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 Researchers used the search engines Google and Bing to check the
cost of common services like cholesterol tests, hip replacements and
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in 8 cities: New York; Los
Angeles; Chicago; Seattle; Baltimore, Maryland; Charlotte, North
Carolina; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Tallahassee, Florida.
They did a simple search, such as “cost of hip replacement in Los
Angeles,” swapping in different medical services and cities each
time, to see how often the results would lead consumers to a price.
Of 1,346 websites in the search results that weren’t advertisements,
only 234, or 17 percent, provided geographically relevant price
information, the study found.
“Our findings suggest that there is substantial room for improvement
in providing consumers with ready access to health care prices
online,” Dr. Peter Ubel of Duke University in Durham, North
Carolina, and colleagues write in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The lack of price transparency online persists at a time when a
growing number of consumers are turning to the Internet to make
decisions about their health. It also comes at a time when many
consumers are either uninsured or have medical benefits with high
deductibles that require them to pay steep out-of-pocket fees for
their care.
Among the websites that turned up in the search results, only 295,
or 22 percent, were designed to explain pricing for a specific
medical intervention, the study found.
Another 382 websites belonged to single providers or clinics, while
63 gave information on quality without any details on pricing, the
study also found.
Roughly 17 percent of the websites, or 234, didn’t offer any
information that appeared related to pricing or health costs at all.
The availability of online price information also appeared to vary
by region.
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In Chicago, about 27 percent of the websites offered locally
relevant price information, while only 7 percent of websites did
this for Baltimore.
It’s possible that some websites with online pricing information
didn’t show up in the researchers’ search results, if the managers
of those sites didn’t use so-called search optimization tools, the
authors note.
Most websites didn’t specify whether any costs displayed were the
consumer’s out-of-pocket fees. For example, prices for cholesterol
testing in Chicago ranged from $25 to $100, brain MRIs ranged from
$230 to $1,950, and hip replacements went from $27,000 to $80,671.
“Unfortunately, while pricing information online can give one a
rough estimate of the variation in pricing and higher versus lower
pricing at different centers, they usually do not give an accurate
estimate of actual costs,” said Dr. Nilay Kumar, a researcher at the
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in
Madison who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Patients should directly check with their insurers and providers
regarding pricing for services,” Kumar said by email.
Cost isn’t necessarily going to be the main factor driving patients’
decisions about health care, said Dr. Karandeep Singh, a researcher
at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who wasn’t involved in
the study. Often, patients will decide where to go for care based on
which providers are in-network with their insurance, and this might
not always include the highest-quality or most affordable providers,
Singh said.
“Unfortunately, cost information continues to remain a black box,”
Singh said by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2iOcP3R JAMA Internal Medicine, online
December 4, 2017.
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