Complaining about health care prices is nothing new. The medical component of CPI has been higher than the overall CPI for decades. As far back as 1989 Gerry Anderson and colleagues showed "It's the Prices, Stupid" that explained why our national spending was so high compared to other countries. More recently, Elizabeth Rosenthal detailed those prices in an series of reports in The New York Times. She recently followed those up with her incisive book An American Sickness. Dr. Rosenthal also illustrated some of the clever techniques used to wring the most money out of our pockets, such as the upcoding industry and tacking facility fees onto visits. As the saying goes, if you're sitting at a poker table and you can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you.
Castlight Health
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2014 Health IT Venture Funds Fly High
Six companies attracted millions from top venture investors...
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A Giant Leap In The Quest For Clear Health Costs? PokitDok Offers An API To Parse Pricing
California-based startup PokitDok is adding another tool in its quest to provide clear healthcare costs to patients. Today it will unveil its API, “PokitDok Platform,” filled with hard-to-reach pricing data...
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Can IT Cure Healthcare's Inertia?
Perhaps you've seen the TV commercial for a popular arthritis drug that says, "A body at rest tends to stay at rest, while a body in motion tends to stay in motion." The ad refers, of course, to a law of physics called inertia--which brings to mind the U.S. healthcare system... Read More »
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Can Todd Park Revolutionize the Health Care Industry?
His title is chief technology officer, but at HHS, Park is the entrepreneur-in-residence, inspiring others to make government data accessible
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Consumers Are Still Held Back From Making Rational Health Decisions
Price and quality of care–those are what we’d like to know when we need a medical procedure. But a perusal of a recent report from the Government Accountability Office reminded me that both price and quality information are hard to get nowadays...
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Exposing the Cost of Health Care
Travelocity for medicine: Castlight's data-driven tool sheds light on the costs of medical care, information that can be difficult for consumers to find on their own. It's easy to compare prices on cameras, vacations, and homes. But in the United States, patients fly blind when paying for health care. Read More »
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Hospital Charges Bear Little Relationship To The Quality Of The Care, Study Says
It’s well known that the charges hospitals list for surgeries and other procedures bear little resemblance to the actual prices most patients pay. An analysis by Castlight Health, a company that helps employers and workers compare prices, has found that the charges also bear little relationship to the quality of the care. Read More »
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In Health Care, Price Transparency Alone Isn’t Enough
As startups and consumer advocates push for more transparency in health care pricing, a study in the Journal of Consumer Research looks at how the price of medication can influence consumers’ perceived health risk. Read More »
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Is Comparison Shopping the Future of Health Care? Silicon Valley Says Yes.
Whether it’s looking up restaurants on Yelp! or scanning Craigslist for apartment listings, Americans comparison shop for nearly everything online — everything except for health care. A recent survey found that we spend more time comparing value of dishwashers than doctors. Castlight Health wants to change that. Read More »
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Kangaroos, Insurance Companies, and the Rising Cost of Healthcare
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mHealth, Data Analytics See $4.7 Billion In 2014 VC Funding
The past year saw a $4.7 billion investment in healthcare IT companies, according to a report from Mercom Capital Group, as venture capital firms seek to promote lucrative technologies in the practice-facing and consumer-facing markets. Data analytics, population health management, and clinical decision support products were among the most likely to grab investor attention in 2014, while mHealth, telehealth, and wearable technologies saw $2.3 billion in major deals...
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No Forms For You!
What do you hate worst about health care? It could be the uncertainty about diagnoses, or the impreciseness of treatments. Or there is the opaqueness about the actual performance of our providers. Maybe it is the drabness and/or confusing layout of many health care settings, or the interminable waiting we do in them. But somewhere on the list has to be having to fill out all those forms, over and over, at practically every stop along the way. If only someone would do for health care what Amazon is trying to do with grocery stores with Amazon Go. If you've missed the many stories about Amazon Go, or don't want to bother with the above video, it goes something like this...
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OK, I Admit It. I Have a Mancrush on the New Federal CTO, Todd Park
I couldn't be more delighted by the announcement today that Todd Park has been named the new Chief Technology Officer for the United States, replacing Aneesh Chopra. Read More »
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Report: Digital Health Firm Investments Skyrocketing
Investments in "digital health" companies--including firms in the health IT and wireless spaces--more than tripled in the first six months of 2012, according to a new report from Burrill & Co., a San Francisco financial services company. Read More »
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Todd Park: Who Is President Obama's New CTO?
On Friday, President Barack Obama appointed Todd Park, a 39-year-old former entrepreneur and founder of Athenahealth, to be the new U.S. Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Park takes over for Aneesh Chopra, the first U.S. CTO, who resigned in February. "It is possible to be entrepreneurial in the U.S. government," Park told Bloomberg Businessweek. Read More »
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