We launched our Medpage Today partnership in 2015, joining hands with this big provider of news, opinion and continuing medical education to 670,000 providers.
Here’s a post describing the Clearhealthcosts.com partnership with MedPage Today. Here’s the lead editor’s note, and here’s a moving essay by a doctor telling us why this is so important. And here’s a page with links to several MedPage Today posts.
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.
For our MedPage Today partnership, we also highlighted a data set of big-ticket items that are a mix of inpatient and outpatient procedures. We collected these from the providers themselves, and put them in searchable form on the internet. This database is separate from the collection of common, “shoppable” procedures, because it isn’t governed by CPT codes. For more details on this data set, go here.
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.
