Cash is the Best Incentive for Health Plan Members to Shop for Services

For many years, health plans have been searching for ways to incentivize their members to search for lower priced services such as imaging and surgical procedures like total hip replacement. I believe that the best incentive for this searching and cost-saving behavior is some sort of benefit like cash. A recent article covered this topic (see:How employers save money by paying employees to shop for healthcare) and below is an excerpt from it: According to a new RAND Corp. study published in Health Affairs, paying employees between $25 and $500 for using a transparency tool, and encouraging them to select a lower-cost provider for certain elective healthcare services, can result in modest savings of about 2.1 percent over the course of a year.....The research looked atinsurer Health Care Service Corp's rewards program, which 29 employers have offered to roughly 270,000 workers enrolled in PPO plans in 2017.....[T]he program encouraged employers to pay workers $25 to $500, depending on the service and its cost, with the use of a price transparency tool (or a rewards advice line) a prerequisite for eligibility. Slightly more than 8 percent of workers used a price transparency tool, and about 23 percent of those patients were given a reward payment for going with a lower-priced option. Among patients in PPO plans, 1.9 percent received the reward payment. As patients switched from higher- to lower-cost providers, employers saved about $8 per member -- translating t...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Healthcare Business Healthcare Delivery Hospital Financial Medical Consumerism Medical Research Public Health Quality of Care Radiology Source Type: blogs