Building Cost Transparency from the Ground Up

In March 2015 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) sponsored the second annual conference on health care price, cost, and quality transparency. At the conference, Niall Brennan, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data officer, pointed out that just a few years ago, a three-day summit on health care transparency would have been unheard of because there would have been nothing to talk about. At the summit pre-conference, the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NRHI) did a deep dive about its RWJF-funded project focused on health care cost transparency at the local level that illustrated just this point about how far we have come. In May 2013, when NRHI approached the RWJF to express interest in measuring the total cost of health care and resource use in five communities across the country in a standardized way (herein referred to as the Total Cost of Care project), it seemed unbelievable that, while we as a nation talked a lot about health care costs, we had no idea how much was really being spent at the local level. The project uses the Total Cost of Care measure created by HealthPartners, which includes all health care costs associated with a person and is calculated using health care claims data. The National Quality Forum endorsed the measure. Cost reporting is a sensitive issue in health care. It can be easier to talk about at a high level than at a more granular one when you are talking about confidential issues of reimbursement and cont...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Costs and Spending GrantWatch Payment Policy Quality Consumers Health Care Costs High-Value Care local health care Nonmedical Determinants Source Type: blogs