Mike Freed can't say for sure there's any great benefit to posting price information online that provides patients some idea what they could expect to pay when they have a diagnostic test or procedure performed at Spectrum Health.
Nor has he seen any large public demand for the data.
Yet at the same time, "it doesn't hurt us" to do it, said Freed, the chief financial officer at Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health.
"We don't lose anything and it's not much effort to do," Freed said. "We can't figure out why someone else would have a problem with it."
By adopting that posture and publishing price data online, Spectrum Health is out front of a slowly emerging trend in health care: Giving price information to the public.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/03/2009 01:25:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
