![]() ![]() Prime Healthcare is also formally joining Carbon Health Connect, Carbon Health's partnership ecosystem developed to increase access to critical health services and to streamline the patient experience as patients move across the care continuum. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Prime Healthcare, an award-winning national health system, and Carbon Health, a leading healthcare provider, announced the expansion of their strategic partnership, increasing healthcare access and redefining healthcare delivery to hundreds of thousands of patients in communities across the United States. More to come.Īs always, please let us know here if you have questions or feedback.ONTARIO, CALIF. We’ll eventually build easy ways to search for specialist providers, but for that, price is the wrong selection criterion, so we have to give it more thought. Over the long term, we want to make all pricing for all standardized services (diagnostic and otherwise) transparent, so patients can know what they’ll pay before the visit. We’re experimenting with COVID vaccines (to support the pandemic) and endocrinologists. To date, we’ve shipped three maps for diagnostic services: COVID-19 testing, flu shots, and mammograms. Even in the cases where we called the facilities, the person answering the phone often did not know and couldn’t find the self-pay price for their practice. Where they’re not, we’re calling facilities to ask for their prices. To solve this, we’re doing things that don’t scale - where prices are listed, we’re scraping them. A real patient would pay a significantly discounted price, and those discounts aren’t captured anywhere. Even those organizations have only partial data, which is assembled on behalf of insurers, so the data they do have contains significant distortions, as providers inflate their listed self-pay prices to create negotiating leverage with insurers. In every case, they stopped talking to us once they realized our goals. As we started this initiative, we found a few organizations that had assembled massive databases of healthcare pricing from a combination of providers and insurers. There’s no uniform database of self-pay prices for healthcare services for all providers in the U.S. The Healthcare Industry Doesn’t Want This Other providers will have to lower their costs and publish their prices Low-cost providers will publish their prices and get more patientsĤ. Train patients to expect to know how much services will cost before they pay for themģ. Make it easy to find the lowest-cost services near you (like the cheapest nearby X-ray)Ģ. We want everyone else’s prices to be online as well. So we’re building a way to do that.Īll our prices are already online. But if you’re one of 30 million uninsured Americans and you need a mammogram, you can’t find the cheapest one near you. For example, an Aetna user can go to the Aetna portal to find in-network providers. Most health resources (like insurance portals) are built for insured consumers by insurers.Īll this means that if you’re uninsured, the quality of information available to you is literally worse than the quality of information available to an insured patient.Most healthcare isn’t paid for by consumers, so health information is controlled by those who pay (insurers).COVID-19 testing was a new service and was rolled out quickly but unevenly around the U.S.There are a few reasons for this, some of which were specific to the pandemic, but most are general. that it might otherwise have taken us a while to learn (healthcare veterans would know this, but I was a noob): for patients, finding exactly what you need in healthcare is hard. The response to these tools and the rapid onset of the pandemic revealed something about healthcare in the U.S. But tons of people used our test finder, and friends who knew I worked at Carbon Health would occasionally reach out if they needed a test (for example, if they were about to travel or had been recently exposed), and I’d just point them to it. Nowadays, there are lots of ways to access testing, and access to testing is pretty widely available. As time has gone by, we’ve built some automated processes. The first version was literally the result of a small team at Carbon Health calling thousands of hospitals and health centers around the country and some scraping.
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