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Texas Web site provides price transparency

Patient Financial Services Weekly Advisor, March 29, 2007

A new Web site in Texas allows healthcare consumers to price shop for common medical procedures ahead of time, reports the Star-Telegram in Fort Worth.

Texas PricePoint provides consumers price information from most of the hospitals in the state, as well as information regarding the duration of stays for many treatments.

"Employers are trying to push more accountability to their employees on the purchasing of their services," Patricia Kolodzey, the Texas Hospital Association's director of advocacy and public policy, told the Star-Telegram. "This is a good first step for Texas to put some information out there, to allow the consumer-whether they have insurance or whether they do not have insurance-to actually look at some of the hospital information."

The Web site pulls its information from 2005 statistics. It allows consumers to determine which hospitals performed a certain procedure the most in 2005, which hospital charges the least for that procedure, and how long the procedure hospitalizes a patient at each hospital."

The Web site, however, does not provide quality of care information.

Click here to visit the Web site.

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