comparison-shopping on healthcare

There are a lot of inflated cost in health industry. However, there is comparatively little efforts in bringing in comparison-shopping to reduce cost. I did a collaborative study about this and it was published as a chapter in a book titled "Healthcare and the Effect of Technology: Developments, Challenges, and Advancements" edited by Dr. Kabene. In that study, we investigated the comparison-shopping practice in health industry ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital service, physician service, etc. We found that the most developed sector in this field is comparison on health insurance. Services like insurable.com, healthinsurance.com, and ehealthinsurance.com, emerged quickly in the late 90s. Comparison-shopping for the selection of prescription drugs, hospitals, and physicians are next but lagging behind.We attribute this lagging behind to three factors: the lacking of commercial motivations from comparison-shopping service providers, relatively scant data available for comparison compared with the health insurance field, and concerns of copyright violation when the comparison-shopping service providers have to retrieve data collected by non-profit and private organizations like Joint Commissions.




Some state governments have begun to provide state specific hospital information for their resident patients. Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP), for example, is an independent state agency that monitors the quality of health services in Massachusetts. It provides side-by-side comparisons on clinic data via different search criteria based on different information needs. MHQP also looks at the quality of health service through patient experiences. Patients complete surveys and rate what it is like to work with their doctors. This information is then used to compare patient experiences across the state.


Some state government began to provide comparison-shopping on physician services. For example, New York State provides such a service and allows individuals to review a physician’s profile that includes their medical education, legal actions taken against the doctor, translation services available at the doctor’s office, etc.


Probably, the most widely available comparison-shopping services are prescription drugs prompted by increasing costs in recent years. These are mainly provided by state governments. For example, the Connecticut attorney general’s office provide a comparison-shopping service on prescription drugs and allows patients to compare pharmacy prescription drug prices across the state of Connecticut. The State of Illinois makes similar comparison-shopping information available to its residents.

According to a recent article by New York Times, some entrepreneurs will launch a service called Castlight that allow patients to compare cost of procedures. The data will come from insurance company since they paid for that. This is a clever idea cause insurance companies certainly have the incentive to reduce such cost. However, price may not be the most important factor in the decision by patients. The reputation of the doctor and hospital is more important. Also, if patients don't need to pay much for the service, there is little incentive for them to comparison shopping for that.


Currently, this new service is signing contract with companies because employers have the incentive to reduce cost too. So they may either persuade or push their employee to use it.


It is interesting to see what will happen next.