Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 2)

Torben Nielsen: You’ll be surprised, that even though everybody’s insured, at how much variation you see in price within just one block of wherever you live. By going to an in-hospital versus a surgical center that’s right next door, you can save thousands of dollars. That’s exciting because it’s almost the analogy that we like to talk about. Remember in the good old days when you wanted to buy used cars. You, as an individual, didn’t have any information. You would walk into a lot and the car salesman would say, “I have these three cars. You can choose between them. One has run 50,000 miles and is 13 years old and I’m going to charge this much for it. The other one is the same model but only ran 25,000 miles and is three years old. I’m going to charge this much.” You had no idea whether that’s a good or bad price until Edmunds.com came about. Then, you started to get all that information as an individual. You started to have just as much information as the used car salesman.

Today, when you go shop for used cars, you no longer go to the lot. You go to the web. That’s where you get all the information. You can compare and shop around. You can get the best deal based on the year and mileage. We want to create that same experience for you when you go do your healthcare shopping. You can look providers and treatments. You can actually see as part of our treatment cost estimator, it gives you what elements goes into treatment prior to your going into the hospital. Are there tests? Are there certain consultations you have with your doctor? Then, you have the actual surgery. What’s that going to cost me? How long is it going to take? How much time should I take off from work typically? Then there’s the post-follow up. You have these information nuggets in a nice timeline and you get the costs. It actually breaks down the individual costs that goes into the pre, actual, and post.

What’s even better about this is since we’re getting all this data from health plans, we can start aggregating all of the data and show you how many of the other health plan members had a similar procedure done. How many of them had a test done as part of their post-follow up versus members that didn’t? You can see percentages and you can start having a really informed conversation with your providers and say, “It seems like only 7% of other members had this particular drug assigned to them during a certain period. Do I really need it? Are there other alternatives that I should be looking at?”

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq
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