Consumers’ and providers’ responses to public cost reports and how to raise the likelihood of achieving desired results

摘要

There is tremendous interest in different approaches to slow the rise in US per capita health spending. One approach is to publicly report on a provider’s costs (also called efficiency, resource use, or value measures) with the hope that consumers will select lower cost providers and thereby encourage providers to decrease spending. In this paper, we explain why we believe many current cost profiling efforts are unlikely to have this intended effect. We then suggest changes to content and design to increase the intended consumer and provider response to publicly reported cost measures.