Guest Interview: Mona Lori of OutOfPocket.com
Mona Lori is a principle of OutOfPocket.com, a site which lets you find out what other people paid for healthcare services in your area. Recently they launched a new search engine. UsableMarkets (at the suggestion of AltSearchEngines) thought this would be a good opportunity to catch up with Mona again and see what’s changed in the last year. (Mona was last interviewed by UM in August 2007).
UsableMarkets: For people who don’t know, can you briefly describe what OutOfPocket.com is, and how it’s supposed to help healthcare consumers.
Mona Lori: OutofPocket.com is a search engine for consumers to look up prices, comparison shop, and find out what others paid for similar health care services in their area. Knowledge is powerful and as consumers are spending more of their own health care dollars, knowing how much a specific health care service is going to cost – before the services is provided, can save consumers hundreds of dollars. Consumers that have not researched prices upfront often end up overpaying for services because they have no idea what is a reasonable price for the service (or provider). In addition, for cash paying consumers, providers are often willing to negotiate a discount of sometimes 50%, however, if consumers are not aware of true prices for this service, they can end up overpaying. We have found that using OutofPocket.com can be a real cost savings for consumers that pay out-of-pocket, whether they are insured, under-insured or uninsured.
UM: You’ve added a new search engine to your site that looks at data on your site, and on other sites as well. Can you talk about how opening up your site search to new data sources is helping the site?
ML: When we first launched OutofPocket.com in 2007, our search engine relied on consumers (user generated content) to contribute prices they paid for actual visits. We recognized we could provide consumers with more meaningful data by expanding the search to include other sources of existing pricing. The site now collects data from multiple sources including consumer contributed content, imported provider price lists, claims data, Government CMS Medicare payment data, websites that publish health care prices (hospitals, diagnostic testing facilities, clinics, labs, physician practices), and price transparency tools on public websites. We continue to enhance OutofPocket.com to include new sources of prices in an effort to provide consumers with meaningful price data. Traffic to the site has increased with the additional sources of data because consumers are getting more relevant search results.
UM: How do you decide what new data sources are appropriate for your site?
ML: Our approach is “more is better”. Any provider, health plan, state, hospital association, vendor or website that discloses public pricing – we try to include their data in our index. The more prices we index, the more meaningful the search tool will be for consumers. We have tools that enable us to import price lists from any provider that discloses their prices –there is no charge for providers to submit their prices. Our search engine also crawls web pages to index sites that provide pricing, or price transparency tools.
UM: Are there new search features planned for OutOfPocket.com?
ML: We are focused on delivering a search tool that is as friendly to use as the Google search tool. As with any software, there are always new features in the plans.
UM: Do you see a lot of Health 2.0 companies / initiatives that are trying to bring more transparency to healthcare pricing (other than your company)?
ML: I personally research all the new health care price transparency tools as soon as they are announced. The lack of robust price transparency tools available for consumers today is really disappointing. Health plans continue to offer their members “limited” tools that often do not help members make informed choices when selecting providers in their network. Few providers offer public pricing and as a results consumers still have to call and ask for prices and they are often given the list price – not the true contracted (negotiated) price.
I started researching price transparency initiatives for OutofPocket.com in December 2006 and the culture of keeping health care prices a secret is still prevalent. As an industry, we have a lot to learn about providing meaningful transparency tools for consumers and getting the stake holders in the industry to collaborate. Earlier this year, Alliance Community Hospital in Ohio announced that they will offer patients $100 if patients send in their EOBs that identify what health insurers paid for care at rival hospitals. This is a very expensive attempt to provide consumers with more information about the true cost of medical services. I am not sure how many providers can afford to offer consumers $100 to share their prices, so we invite these same consumers to use OutofPocket.com to post prices they paid for services they received. I am optimistic that shopping for health care services will eventually become more like shopping for electronics, appliances, and vacations where consumers can easily look up & compare prices, understand the quality and review recommendations using online tools. OutofPocket.com is a small step forward in this direction.
UM: Thank you Mona.
