Castlight Brings Bargain Hunting to Health Care

Check out this San Francisco Business Times article about Castlight Health, an organization making real price and cost transparency information available to patients, enabling them to make more informed decisions. The model provides a consumer tool to engage patients in finding high quality cost effective care. Some of the early results reflect savings of 20-30%. This tool is available for many of the larger self-insured clients that can supply claims data to Castlight so they can calculate the actual medical professional fees, based on the carriers network.

OHM provides similar capabilities, helping not only the large self-insured with claim data but also smaller employers with limited access to statisticall relevant claim data.  OHM allows purchasers to float an RFP to the medical professionals in the network to bid on whatever services the purchaser is interested in. For example my blog yesterday highlighted in the Mass market that the cost of a hip replacement could vary from $14,000 to $25,000. In my former role as Director of Benefits for a Fortune 500 company we where able to reduce the price of a hip replacement from over $50,000 to under $20,000. In most markets the price of routine medical services can vary as much as 300%!  In our market the price of a routine colonoscopy varies from $4,500 to $1,500. Deploying this type of direct contracting with medical professionals can reduce total spend by over 20% while delivering safer, higher quality care to your members.