Transparency in Healthcare
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration launched www.floridahealthfinder.gov a new health care transparency tool for consumers. The new
website allows consumers and caregivers to look up the average amounts
paid by Florida insurance plans for a specific service, giving them a
better estimate of their total out-of-pocket expenses. The
service bundle information is a non-personalized estimate of costs
that may be incurred by the patient for anticipated services and the
actual costs will be based on services actually provided to the
patient. The average amounts paid by insurance plans are based on
billions of lines of claims data from three Florida health
plans. Claims data from additional health plans are expected to
be added to the database in 2018.
- The website lists the services as “care bundles”. A care bundle
includes the steps and procedures that are part of a typical treatment
plan for that specific care bundle. For example, the care bundle
for Knee Replacement includes an office visit with a specialist,
surgery, outpatient physical therapy/rehabilitation and follow-up
visits.
- Since 2007, Floridians have been able to use www.floridahealthfinder.gov
to look up undiscounted hospital charges, however, this is rarely the
amount that individuals or insurance companies are expected to pay. Now,
with this new tool, and in conjunction with working with their
respective insurance plans, Floridians have the opportunity to get a
much better estimate of out-of-pocket costs for specific services.