Since Medicare released pricing data on hospital charges months ago, the pressure has been on hospitals to be more transparent. A challenge from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has brought forth interactive tools that should help providers and consumers.
Healthcare decisions might be a lot simpler for consumers to make thanks to developers who participated in a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation challenge. The winners were announced Tuesday.
The winners were announced at the Health 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley, where most of the contestants demonstrated their creations.
Since Medicare released pricing data on hospital charges several months ago, showing wide variation across the country, there has been "increasing pressure for hospitals to be more transparent about their pricing," RWJF says on its website, where the developer challenge was laid out.
The challenge was designed to increase understanding by both providers and consumers. "The fundamental goal is to help users better understand and potentially use hospital charge data," the site says.
The second contest, Hospital Price Transparency Challenge, Interactive Visualization, awarded $9,000 first place prize to Adam McCann, a 30-year specialist in predictive modeling. He works as a consultant for Deloitte. McCann's myoptimalhospital, allows a user to go to any city and specific hospital in the country and see five measures of care (eight adverse events), price, communication and environment (based on responses other patients gave to experience surveys) and service, all based on quality measures reported to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
A particularly intriguing aspect of the site is the five sliders that allow the user to adjust the weight given to a particular measure. For example, a user might rank price as least important, with a 0, but give the other four measures a rank of four or five.
The site then gives the user an "average score" based on those weights, and allows the user to compare that with other hospitals in that city.
In an interview, McCann says that the site "is a very very early version of the tool. I designed it for the contest, but I'm still working to make it more intuitive. It's not yet as perfect as I would like it to be."
Kathy Hempstead, RWJF's program officer, said the philanthropy was inspired to launch the contests by Medicare's release of the Chargemaster data in May, "to foster transparency and direct attention to that data."
That the data was downloaded more than 300,000 times within days of its release, she says, indicates "people are peeking through a door and don't like what they see. They see all these crazy prices that vary in ways that don't have much to do with quality, or anything they can understand."
"This pushes the door open a little bit farther."
She adds that by inviting people with video and graphic skills who work with this and other Medicare data to visually assemble it for consumers, the foundation "could democratize pricing, so that it's not just something for researchers or certain small groups of people who understand it."
The goal of the contest also was to "allow people to imagine thinking about healthcare decision-making as a little bit more of a market-based phenomenon."
For McCann's winning entry, Hempstead says that the judges were impressed by its effort to acknowledge that consumers might not all have the same preferences. By merging in an interactive way, pricing, patient experience, quality measures and other factors, could be seen as a realistic approximation of the way "actual consumers might make decisions right now."
The second-place winner of $7,000 for interactive visualization challenge is Drake Pruitt, Mauro Brunato and Roberto Battiti for their "Clinic Optimizer," and third place prize, $3,000, was won by Sagar Sawant for Crystal Care. Edward Kim, of wHealth; and the third place winner is Melvin Hill, for "Hospital Prices and Consumer Assessment."
The Hospital Price Transparency Challenge had a separate component for static visualization. The first place prize of $6,000 was won by Esther Chak and Mary-Jo Valentino. Second place prize of $3,500 was taken by Edward Kim of wHealth and Melvin Hill won the third place prize for Hospital Prices and Consumer Assessment.