YAHPTP: Yet Another Healthcare Pricing Transparency Product (fails to deliver)
Guroo is the latest in a string of healthcare transparency tools that fail to make the consumer experience any better.
Modern Healthcare recently published an article announcing the launch of Guroo, a website that enables consumers to educate themselves on various healthcare procedures and compare costs. As I reviewed the site, I thought it provided yet another illustration of how so many products that seek to bring information transparency to healthcare miss the mark. To be fair, this goal is not easy and Guroo did a few things that were unique. But, when it comes to making the consumer experience with healthcare better, Guroo provides a good case study of a product that failed to consider the end-to-end experience.
First, here’s a couple areas where Guroo went wrong:
Average Prices
Guroo provides average prices for each care bundle and procedure. If there’s one rule to pricing in healthcare, it’s that averages are incredibly misleading. Government data on hospital pricing has revealed up to a 7x variability in prices for the same procedure, even within the same region (raw data located here). “Average price” is a horribly inaccurate indicator of the actual amount you’ll owe when such large variability exists in the market. To Guroo’s credit, they also provide a range of prices so you can see the potential best and worst case scenarios.
Lack of Personalization
In the same vein as average prices, Guroo does not provide the price for your specific health plan. If you tell me the average consumer in my area pays $400 for an MRI, that’s far less trust-inspiring than if you tell me that, given my insurance plan, I will pay $400 for an MRI. Guroo also uses data from a limited number of participating insurers to calculate the average cost and price range. Aetna, Assurant Health, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare currently participate. If you’re covered by Blue Cross or another insurer, Guroo’s average is unlikely to accurately reflect your specific cost.
Failure to “Close the Loop”
Guroo does not expose data on the prices for specific physicians and facilities. After visiting their site, it’s natural to ask: “So if I want the average price for procedure X, which physician should I go to?” Unfortunately, this data is completely absent from Guroo’s product, let alone even viewing a list of phone numbers for physicians that perform procedure X in your area. Without the ability to channel more volume to specific, higher value providers, information transparency in healthcare adds very little value. Think about how you might react if Amazon allowed you to search for a product on their site, displayed an average price without any reviews, and had no “add to cart” button or check-out functionality. This is the state of healthcare today. No one has succeeded at closing the shop and buy user experience loop and Guroo is no different.
Quality, where art thou?
Guroo provides price information and some questions to ask your physician but exposes no data on how you as a consumer might be able to assess the quality of the various physicians who perform a given procedure. Nor do they expose any quality measures for physicians in your area. Sure, quality in healthcare is hard but I would have at least expected the normal half-hearted attempt.
Fragmented Tools
Guroo is completely unintegrated with any of the places consumers might go today to educate themselves on their healthcare decisions. It might be a nice feature to add to a health insurer’s online portal or to an employer’s internal benefits site. Alternatively, Guroo could try to own the entire consumer experience themselves. Building a feature and delivering it as a standalone site, completely out of context, only contributes to the fragmentation in healthcare’s “consumer tools” ecosystem, increases adoption barriers, and hardly makes the consumer experience any easier.
Endorsement by UnitedHealthcare
*Cue Cynicism* You know something’s fishy when you see an explicit endorsement of information transparency in healthcare from a large insurance company. Quoted from the Modern Healthcare article:
“[Guroo] is going to use this data to ultimately create a national source of truth for consumers,” said Tom Beauregard, executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group.
UnitedHealthcare has this data for their customers already. They could create a single source of truth for their customers tomorrow if they wanted to (minus the provider systems who have pricing gag clauses in their contracts). But they choose not to. Instead, United relies on endorsements of sites like Guroo to pay lip service to transparency. Meanwhile, they continue to build a business model that depends on obscurity of information instead of attempting to repair the consumer experience. Castlight Health, which has been the most successful at reverse-engineering a plan and provider specific pricing database for self-insured employers, continues to struggle with accessing data from insurers who champion transparency in public, but refuse to provide access in private.
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Notwithstanding everything above, Guroo did do something unique on their site that I hope becomes a model for other products in this area. They created a list of common “care bundles” which group together all the line items associated with a given procedure and provide a total, all-in cost. If you’ve ever reviewed a healthcare bill before, you’ll recall that they consist of many indecipherable line items. There’s no such thing in healthcare today as “the cost for a knee replacement.” Yet, Guroo has attempted to move in this direction, which provides a welcome simplification for understanding the total cost of a given procedure in a more intuitive, consumer-friendly way.
