Health plan members gain new, detailed treatment insights on health care costs and recovery times
PORTLAND, Ore. – July 26, 2018 – People looking to have a tonsillectomy, bariatric surgery or a sleep study can now see full cost estimates and complete timelines for all aspects of their care—based on their individual health insurance benefits—thanks to HealthSparq’s Treatment Timeline.
“We’ve added new treatments based on what people are actively searching for,” said Matt Parker, vice president of products for HealthSparq. “The data showed us that people are increasingly looking for cost and provider information related to sleep studies, weight loss surgery and laryngoscopy, among other more complex medical services. In fact, we added those and many more, a 30 percent increase of treatment types, to our HealthSparq One® transparency and guidance platform. We’ll continue to grow the number of encounters and treatments, and our treatment guidance capabilities, over the next year to help people better understand the complete journey of their care.”
While some health needs can be simple and involve only one visit with a provider, many treatments require multiple encounters, including doctor visits, labs, imaging, prescriptions, surgery and physical therapy. Many online tools let people search for individual encounters and average costs for those encounters, but they don’t provide people with the full picture of their care.
HealthSparq’s Treatment Timeline is the only online tool that illustrates the episodes of care, showing end-to-end timelines and the associated cost estimates in terms of time and dollars, based on claims data and other expert medical sources.
Treatment Timeline helps people partner with their doctors early on in their diagnosis to develop a sound treatment plan. People can then better plan for health care expenses by understanding the number and type of procedures and medications required. They can also see what other patients in their health plan typically choose.
About HealthSparq
At HealthSparq, we help people make smarter health care choices by partnering with health plans to provide members with cost and quality information about doctors, hospitals and medical services, based on their individual benefits. We put people at the core of everything we do by conducting continuous usability testing, eliciting consumer feedback to enhance product development, hosting industry panels featuring everyday people, and bringing human stories to the forefront through our #WTFix campaign. Using these insights, we create solutions to help people understand and navigate the health care system better than ever before.
Growing since our founding in 2008 from our home in Portland, Oregon, we now serve around 100 health plan brands nationwide. Contact us at HealthSparq.com or tweet us @HealthSparq.
