Smart Choices Help Ease Treatment Pangs

The future of healthcare lies in developing smart consumers: patients who are able to make intelligent, economically informed decisions about their healthcare. One way to help accomplish this is to promote the price transparency of costly medical procedures. By providing patients with comparative cost information about their medical procedure from various facilities and hospitals, this would better equip and motivate the patient to choose the lower-cost facility. More times than not, that same medical procedure might cost, on average, $1,100 less at a nearby facility than at the hospital. In short, identifying a clinically equivalent but lower-cost option should ultimately reduce the overall cost of a patient’s treatment plan.