For decades, healthcare price and quality have been impossible to easily determine due to a myriad of data sources of widely varying bias, credibility and meaningfulness, and an overall lack of relevant data. Consumers could compare prices and quality of nearly everything they purchased, except healthcare - which truly has life and death implications.

Efforts by innovative employers to contain escalating costs, and by high-performing providers to improve efficiency and proficiency, created the growing demand for healthcare price and quality rankings. Accomplishing this requires unearthing true and independently determined value - not just "secret" negotiated insurance rates, Medicare/Medicaid fee schedules and quality metrics of questionable relevance. Monocle applies its proprietary value process and algorithms to distill information into meaningful, unbiased answers with fact-based supporting detail.

Many organizations claim independent price and quality information, but virtually all of them are compromised by conflicts of interest. Monocle is not owned or controlled by insurers, providers, networks or other conflicting parties. Monocle is the only solution providing fully HIPAA-compliant, unbiased, credible, meaningful and measurable products.

 

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The Search for True Healthcare Transparency (PDF)

Price variation for common medical procedures costs Americans with employer-sponsored insurance as much as $36 billion a year (Thomson Reuters, 2/12). A recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (4/12) revealed prices ranging from a low of $1,529 to a whopping high of $182,955.

The mystery of healthcare pricing has contributed significantly to the escalating cost of healthcare. Ending the mystery of pricing will shrink disparities, reward efficient providers and generate savings.

Quality is as important a factor as price, yet most consumers do not incorporate it into their healthcare decisions, largely because that information is not readily available. Online opinions of physicians and hospitals generally focus on wait times or communication skills rather than qualifications and outcomes.

Yet quality does matter: 13.5 percent of Medicare/Medicaid hospital patients experienced an adverse event (a serious event, including death and disability) and another 13.5 percent experienced some other temporary harm that required intervention, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (11/10).