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Tag: Crowdsourcing

It Cost What? Crowdsourcing Costs In An Evolving Healthcare System

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By JEANNE PINDER

flying cadeuciiCrowdsourcing is engaging a lot of news organizations today. While some journalists are nervous about crowdsourcing — “Yikes, we’d rather talk than listen, and what if they tell us something we don’t want to hear? Or something that we know isn’t true?” — we here at clearhealthcosts.com love crowdsourcing. We find, as journalists, that our communities are smart, energized, truthful and engaged, and happy to join hands in thinking, reporting and helping us make something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. We learn great things by listening, so … now we’re going to to an experiment crowdsourcing coverage for our blog.

Our current project crowdsourcing health care prices in California, with KQED public radio in San Francisco and KPCC/Southern California public radio in Los Angeles, has been a great success, as was our previous project with WNYC public radio, and we’re looking forward to launching similar projects with other partners.Continue reading…

How Much Does an MRI Cost In California: $255? $973.25? $2,925?

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By JEANNE PINDER 

Jeanne PinderEarly results from our California crowdsourcing project on MRI prices are in. Payments range from $255 to $2,925.15. MRI pricing is a complete mystery: What should you pay? Can you ask for a discount? We’ve been looking at health-care prices for three years, so if we say it’s a mystery, we can imagine what it looks like to you.

How much should you pay? Well, one person was told the price is $1,850, but if you pay up front, you can save almost $1,300.

The note on our form, shared by our community member: “I was told procedure would be 1850. I have a 7500 deductible. So I talked to the office mgr who said if I paid upfront and agreed not to report the procedure to Blue Cross, that it would be $580.”

On our Facebook page, one contributor wrote, “I was going to be billed $830 through my PPO for an MRI. The cash price? $500.”

This is the second part of our crowdsourcing project in California with KQED public radio in San Francisco and KPCC/Southern California Public Radio in Los Angeles. We have been asking people to share pricing information for MRI’s, especially of the back; last month we collected mammogram pricing.

A note: We are often asked in this crowdsourcing prototype project if we believe what we are being told by people who fill out our online form at the PriceCheck page. The answer: yes, we do. Though some of our community members have said their bills are confusing, or the coding they see on the bills doesn’t match what we’re collecting, we believe our contributors’ shares. We have seen wide variations in health-care pricing.

So: here are early results.

Lower-back MRI: $255? $602.85? $973.25? $1,660?

Eight identical MRI’s, and eight vastly different payments.

No. 1: We heard from one Kaiser member, who received an MRI of the lower back, without contrast or dye (CPT code 72148) at the Kaiser Antioch Medical Center on Sand Creek Road in Antioch, Calif. This person was charged $973.25 and paid $973.25; insurance paid nothing.Comment: “This price was the contracted amount through my insurance. Deductible had not been met so I was responsible for all charges. This does not include the two office visits required to obtain and analyze the results.”

No. 2: Same kind of MRI, code 72148, at Radnet Medical Imaging at 3440 California St. in San Francisco. This person was charged $1,660 and paid $1,660, out of HSA funds. (Note: Our ClearHealthCosts pricing survey included that Radnet location, and they did tell our survey agent that their cash price is $1,660.)

Continue reading…

Crowdsourcing the Kaiser Permanente Center For Total Health

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By THCBist

Our friends at Kaiser Permanente asked us reach out THCB readers for help with a cool crowdsourcing project. The Kaiser innovation team is working on developing new content for The Kaiser Permanente Center For Total Health , KP’s shiny new 16,000 square foot exhibition and meeting space in downtown Washington D.C.

If you’re close enough to make the trip, we highly recommend that you stop by and take an hour or so to poke around a bit before submitting your suggestions.  Failing that, you can take the online interactive tour here.

If you’re a doctor, a med student, a designer, an entrepreneur, a patient – or if you just have a good idea –  we’d like to hear from you.  KP’s innovation team asked us to ask you four questions. You can answer one or you can answer them all.

1.  What is Total Health? In other words, what is health? What’s important to you?

2. What should total health look like when implemented? What innovations can be used to drive change in the healthcare system? What will healthcare look like in the future?

3.How should total health be supported? What can be done to make healthcare better? Smarter?  Both within the healthcare system? And in our own lives?

4. If you were designing an interactive wall to demonstrate total health to visitors what would you focus on. In other words, if you were designing an exhibition what would it look like? What would your message be? What would help educate the public? How would you get that message across? Yes, you can send us an picture.

Answers can be left in the comment thread below. If you prefer to submit a video response via YouTube send the link to editor@thehealthcareblog.com. or paste in the comments below.  Blog posts should be submitted to THCB editors at editor@thehealthcareblog.com

For the interactive design question, we asked THCB’s editors what they’d like to see. Here’s what we came up with on the back of our paper napkin:

Continue reading…

Why Isn’t There a Healthcare.gov App?

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By THCBist

A THCB reader who asked that we not identify him because his company does unrelated contracting work with the government writes in to ask:

“Why isn’t there a Healthcare.gov app? If the problem is that the system is failing because the poorly designed Healthcare.gov web site is being crashed by monster waves of traffic, wouldn’t putting out an app help?

I mean, ‘cmon guys. It’s 2013. Millions of Americans have iPhones, iPads, Androids and god knows what other mobile devices. In theory a freestanding app — even a simple one — that allowed browsing and “print my application” capabilities would help the traffic problem by giving people an alternative way to access the features available at the government web site.

If the problem is in fact the web site and not the data hub, wouldn’t that go a long way to solving the problem? How hard could it possibly be to put something together quickly and get it out there? Why isn’t this being done?

Knowing how this game works, I’m pretty sure the plan was to originally include something like this. Then the vendors and contractors involved quoted an astronomically high price tag that nobody was willing to go for. Then somebody else said something ominous about privacy and an awkward silence broke out at the table. The Healthcare.gov app was put in the “nice to have” – “we’ll get around to it when we can” – “bells and whistles” camp.”

Have a brilliant idea that could help save Healthcare.gov? Somebody has got to do something.  Drop us a note. We’ll publish the good ideas.

Open Research For Open Cures: A Report From Sage Congress

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By Andy Oram

Over four years of Congresses, Sage Bionetworks has drawn together leading thinkers and doers throughout the fields of genetic research and drug development. For two days each year, the conference floor is colonized by clumps of eagerly networking PhDs from academic, pharma, government, non-profits, biotech firms, and patient advocacy groups–people who often glide from one domain to another within this tight-knit cohort.

A cohort, certainly, we can characterize this group of attendees, sharing as they do a mysterious language drawn from years of research most of us will never understand. But is it a community? That will be tested over the following year as Sage Bionetworks lets go of the Congress. Founder Stephen Friend says it is up to others to create the next Congress, and its success or failure will be a measurement of the sweat and passion that Friend and Sage have put into attempts to build a community.

Why should a reader look further at this struggle among a tiny elite, rather than clicking on the next article? Well, first, if you’re one of the 48% of Americans who took a prescription drug this month, you should be concerned about where new breakthrough drugs will emerge. If you visit this web site because you want a more responsive health care system that can match patients to treatments more quickly and cheaply, recognize that new methods are important nowhere as much as at the foundation of the system where new treatments are discovered. And if you are just curious about the potential for global cross-institutional teams and loose networks connecting experts with ordinary members of the public to find creative solutions to old problems, this article will provide insights.

Don’t get too close, you don’t know what I have

The premise on which Friend founded Sage is that research and drug development have stagnated and cannot progress without more collaboration and data sharing. Therefore, with all due regard for the presentations at the recent Sage Congress on cancer research projects and other individual experiments, the real theme of the conference is in the keynotes about open source, the use of social media, and crowdsourcing. The challenge of this community–if we find that it has indeed become a community–is to analyze and deal with the particular challenges that genetic research and drug development inject into trends toward open collaboration.

Continue reading…

Why You Are (Probably) Already Using The Most Powerful Digital Health App

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By David Shaywitz

Among the most frustrating dilemmas facing patients – and physicians – is when doctors are unable to assign a specific diagnosis.  Just having a name for a condition can be remarkably reassuring to patients (and families), providing at least a basic framework, a set of expectations, and perhaps most importantly, an explanation for what the patient is experiencing.

Sara Wheeler, writing in the New York Times in 1999, poignantly described the experience of traveling through “the land of no diagnosis.”  Ten years later, the NYT featured a story called “What’s Wrong with Summer Stiers,” about another patient without a diagnosis – and about a fascinating initiative at the NIH, the “Undiagnosed Disease Program” – specifically created to meet this need.

Continue reading…

Crowd-sourcing Medical Bills

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By KATIE VAHLE

What if everyday purchases were priced and consumed like healthcare services?

These days you’d have to try hard not to know the price of a product or service before you buy it. So imagine booking an airline ticket with zero knowledge of the cost, only to return home to a bunch of outstanding bills for the trip. One statement may cover the seat rental and fuel used. Another bill may itemize each time the flight attendant handed out drinks. A few weeks later a bill for the pilot’s flying time may roll in. Can you imagine the resulting confusion, stress and angst?

I know it sounds absurd but this is the nightmare patients face every time they use the healthcare system. And it isn’t uncommon for these confusing medical bills to spiral out of control. Last year, the Commonwealth Fund (a non-profit healthcare research group) reported that 20% of US adults had medical debt or faced problems paying medical bills and only 58% of Americans felt confident they would be able to afford the care they needed.

So what options do consumers have when faced with the reality of paying for their healthcare?

Continue reading…

Crowdsourcing the Future: Health 2.0 and HIPAA

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By DEVEN McGRAWPicture 61

The Health 2.0 movement has seen incredible growth recently, with new tools and services continuously being released. Of course, Health 2.0 developers face a number of challenges when it comes to getting providers and patients to adopt new tools, including integrating into a health system that is still mostly paper-based. Another serious obstacle facing developers is how to interpret and, where appropriate, comply with the HIPAA privacy and security regulations.

Questions abound when it comes to Health 2.0 and HIPAA, and it’s vital we get them answered, both for the sake of protecting users’ privacy and to ensure people are able to experience the full benefits of innovative Health 2.0 tools. We can’t afford to see the public’s trust in new health information technology put at risk, nor can we afford to have innovation stifled.

To help solve this problem, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has launched a crowdsourcing project to determine the most vexing Health 2.0/HIPAA questions.

This is where you come in:

Whether you are a healthcare provider, a Health 2.0 developer or an e-patient, we hope you’ll visit our website to submit your questions on Health 2.0 and HIPAA.

Once CDT has received your questions, we’ll use them to urge the Office of Civil Rights, which enforces HIPAA, to provide clarification. We’ll accept questions until Feb. 11, 2011, so please weigh in soon, and ask others to do the same.

Deven McGraw is Director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

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