▲ ▼ How much will I be charged for my treatment
How much a patient is charged for a treatment in a private hospital is mostly opaque, until the patient receives the bill. It's common to get 2x - 3x times the projected costs for the treatment.
But, times are not normal; COVID-19 lockdown has cut private hospital revenue extensively as very few people are visiting hospitals for non-COVID related treatment and not many private hospitals are participating in treating COVID-19 patients. Even those private hospitals who are treating COVID-19 patients are charging extraordinarily high price for their treatment.
So, as the lockdown lifts private hospitals are sure to charge exuberantly and discriminately for providing treatments to compensate for their loss of revenue.
It's now more crucial than ever for a patient to get an idea of how much they will get charged for a treatment in a hospital, There are currently no means to know that. A public database where patients can share their hospital bills for everyone to see would helpful in creating transparency for private hospital charges and may also bring accountability from private hospitals.
Have you looked into the new Price Transparency Rule that just went into effect ( https://www.healthcarelawinsights.com/2020/11/the-price-transparency-rule-goes-into-effect-january-1-2021-is-your-hospital-ready/ )?
I think a service that aggregates all of this data and includes additional user-submitted data could be very valuable.
Alec Stein has made use of the Price Transparency Rule in U.S. to publish the price list of 1835 hospitals - https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-07-01-hospitals-compliance/ .
That would indeed be very valuable, Can't believe it took so long. Hopefully a service using it can address the issues I pointed out in the problem.
I recently came across Turquoise Health - https://turquoise.health/ which seems to be aimed at addressing this problem, It seems to be U.S. only at the moment.
As a professional patient, I agree that there's a definite need gap in transparency of medical bills for treatment at private hospitals. The problem to solve in building a solution for this would be to maintain anonymity of the patients and at the same time ensuring veracity of the data shared by them.
Professional patient, lol!
I guess patients might fear retribution from the hospitals they seek treatment from, if they openly share their bills.
That's one of the reasons anonymity is important for this solution, but it can be only partial anonymity as trust needs to be put somewhere and the it's likely to be on the platform.
Neatly explained, I agree that trust plays very important role in such a platform and a NGO makes sense in that case.
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Professional patient, lol!
I guess patients might fear retribution from the hospitals they seek treatment from, if they openly share their bills.