We’re often asked how to make cost-transparency tools more usable. Of course we’re partial to our transparency tool — we’ve spent a lot of time using it, tweaking it, using it again and tweaking again — and so we’re familiar with the ways people act in the process of spending money on health care and how to serve them best. Many of the tools we see aren’t as usable as ours, in our opinion.
This tool from the Singapore Ministry of Health is pretty well done. The screenshot above is for costs of a screening colonoscopy. Of course Singapore has a different approach to health care — transparency is not a problem there — but it’s a good, clean, informative, usable piece of software.
In addition to the pricing page, there’s also a section telling what a patient will be billed on average at different hospitals (both public and private) for different procedures. From the description, it seems that the Singapore equivalent of an All Payer Claims Database has been used to make an enlightening web tool. This, for example, is a hospital admission for breast cancer.
