Assurant Health will join three other insurance heavyweights — Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare — in working with the Healthcare Cost Institute in developing consumer-geared tools for healthcare pricing and quality transparency, the not-for-profit institute announced today.
In addition, the National Committee for Quality Assurance will join a committee charged with identifying quality metrics and data that will be incorporated into the tools, officials said in an announcement. The committee includes the chief medical officers from each of the participating health plans and others are being recruited.
On top of all that, a host of healthcare’s biggest names are collaborating on coming up with consumer transparency and public reporting standards on capitated, integrated and valued-based health plan designs. They include: Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Health Net, Kaiser Permanente and Partners HealthCare.
The Healthcare Cost Institute will then use those recommendations to guide development of its cost and quality transparency effort, while developing standards for public reporting for an all-payer database across all states.
Other major carriers have expressed interest in the initiative, according to the institute, which expects more health plans and other stakeholders to join in the near future.
The institute said in May that it will create and administer an information portal that will provide consumers, employers and regulators information about the price and quality of healthcare. In July, it announced that CMS had granted it access to the Medicare fee-for-service data set as CMS’ only national qualified entity.
The new transparency tools will likely be available in early 2015, officials said, promising to maintain the data in a “highly secure, protected environment.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Such tools will aggregate data from commercial health plans with the intention of ultimately linking it to data from Medicare Advantage and Medicaid health plans, officials said. Price data includes the allowed amount paid by the insurer plus co-pays and deductibles. The cost data will be supplemented with data on quality. The information will be available to consumers, purchasers, regulators and payers in an accessible, comparable and easy-to-use format. Employers will be able to customize their employees’ experience.
