We launched our New Orleans PriceCheck partnership in April 2017, crowdsourcing health prices with partners WVUE FOX 8 Live and NOLA.com I The Times-Picayune.
Our partners include FOX 8 Live’s Lee Zurik, a top-flight investigative reporter who with his team just won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award for this medication pricing series, and NOLA.com’s Jed Lipinski, also a top-flight investigative reporter with multiple prizes under his belt. They are ON FIRE.
Here’s Lee’s leadoff piece from the 10 o’clock news last night, and here’s his Facebook Live, certainly the best Facebook Live I have ever seen. Here’s Jed’s leadoff piece from yesterday morning. A blood test: $522 or $19?
Our traffic is through the roof. We have people passing us bootleg bills and calling us with horror stories. Plus we can see from our analytics that the major health players in the ecosystem are spending a huge amount of time on our sites.
WVUE FOX 8 News, owned by Louisiana Media Company, and operated by Raycom Media, leads New Orleans, Louisiana, the state and the region in the field of broadcast investigative journalism. Lee, the chief investigative reporter and anchor, has won multiple awards for investigative journalism, including one in April 2017 from the Investigative Reporters and Editors for his series “Medical Waste,” about health care pricing.
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune is part of the largest media company in Louisiana, delivering news and information with an intense focus on communities, reaching an audience of 7 million unique readers each month. Jed Lipinski, our primary partner there, has been part of multiple award-winning journalism projects.
For news coverage, look here at WVUE FOX 8 Live and here at NOLA.com I The Times-Picayune.
To see how to use our interactive software, look here
The information in our database comes from several sources. First, our journalists conduct a direct survey of local providers to collect cash or self-pay prices for a range of 30-35 common, “shoppable” procedures. Through our interactive software tool, we encourage community members to add to the site by sharing their pricing information from bills or “explanation of benefits” statements. We also include data on the Medicare reimbursement rate, what the government pays for a procedure in a given area under the Medicare program for older Americans, since that’s the closest thing to a fixed or benchmark price in the marketplace. That figure is computed via a formula used to price 8,400 procedures in 90 separate geographical areas in the system used by the federal government.
More information about the entire data set can be found here. More information about medical codes can be found here.
More information about our nationwide partnerships is collected here.
Articles highlighting our data and our media partnerships have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and in JAMA Internal Medicine. We’ve also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, USA Today and elsewhere. To read more about our work and partnerships, visit our media page.
While we do not have every price for every procedure at every provider across the nation — that data does not exist anywhere — we do have a “community-created guide to health costs” where people can share and search health cost data, as well as explanation and interpretation of the data from our news partners.
To search or share your costs and experiences, click here.
To discuss a potential partnership, email us at partner@clearhealthcosts.com.
