The Big Idea for 2013: Show Me Your Fees
Private practices, hospital-owned practices and affiliated group practices are facing big changes from healthcare reform, demographic shifts, and economic and reimbursement pressure. The industry is re-evaluating itself from top to bottom and looking for new business models, ideas and opportunities to make medical practice feasible. Health insurance is changing as employers and payers are reducing benefits and shifting costs to patients. High deductible health plans (HDHPs) are becoming more popular, and with that patients are thinking more like customers, and making their healthcare decisions based on out-of-pocket costs.
Patients want access to pricing info, and are not satisfied with “it’s complicated” as an answer. The industry as a whole is moving towards rewarding performance over volume, and patients will also be armed with more publicly available performance and safety data.
