Vitals Study Shows Consumers Using Cost Transparency Tools Select Clinical Laboratories with Low Test Prices

Researchers find shopping for medical laboratory tests increased by nearly 50%, and people are saving more than a million dollars annually by shopping for blood tests

Each year, more consumers use online healthcare price-shopping tools to find hospitals, physicians, and clinical laboratories that have the lowest prices. And medical laboratory tests is among the top services on their lists!

Researchers at Vitals of Lyndhurst, NJ, a company that publishes online physician ratings, analyzed how consumers were using its price and quality transparency tools. They confirmed that shopping for medical laboratory tests/blood work is one of the top healthcare procedures checked by consumers.

According to a recent Vitals press release, approximately 46% more people shopped for blood tests in 2015 than the year before, and they saved $1,149,682 by doing so. That’s because their health plans reward them for selecting good quality and low-price providers, as well as adopting healthy behaviors, such as losing weight, exercising more, and lowering high cholesterol scores. (more…)

IBM Watson Health to Acquire Truven Health Analytics and Its Millions of Patient Records for $2.6 Billion

IBM Health’s data combined with Truven’s patient records will create an enormous big-data collection representing 300 million patient lives

If any pathologist or clinical laboratory manager still doubts the importance of healthcare big data, the multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Truven Health Analytics by IBM should put those doubts to rest.

Last month, IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM) announced an agreement to acquire Truven Health Analytics, (Truven) for $2.6 billion. Truven is a provider of cloud-based healthcare, analytics, and insights and is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (more…)

Innovative California NPR Project Takes on Healthcare Pricing Transparency

NPR stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles crowdsourced healthcare cost data from listeners to reveal arbitrary pricing of medical services

Over the past two years, Dark Daily has published a number of stories dealing with price transparency, or lack of it, most of which involved government agencies or nonprofits concerned about the high cost of healthcare services. This latest effort to shine a light on healthcare pricing, however, comes from National Public Radio (NPR).

San Francisco’s NPR station, KQED, initiated PriceCheck, an innovative project designed to reveal just how arbitrary medical pricing is in California, in June 2014. KQED partnered with Los Angeles’ NPR station, KPCC, and ClearHealthCosts.com, a New York City start-up that publishes a national list of low to high charges for common healthcare services, to crowdsource healthcare cost data.

The two NPR stations appealed to listeners to share the charges they paid for four medical services: mammograms, lower-back MRIs, IUDs, and diabetes testing. Hundreds of people responded to share prices they paid for these services, and thousands of people looked up prices on ClearHealthCosts.com. (more…)

UCSF Study Puts Spotlight on the High Prices of Medical Laboratory Tests Charged by California Hospitals

Researchers at the University of California San Francisco revealed that the cost for a simple cholesterol test ranged from as little as $10 to as much as $10,169!

Clinical laboratories owned by hospitals and health systems should take note of a public study of hospital laboratory test prices that was conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). It was published this summer and showed a remarkable range of prices for medical laboratory tests charged by California hospitals.

How about a charge of $10,169 for a routine blood cholesterol test? This was one finding a study discussed in the August 2014 issue of the British Medical Journal Open blog. The study was led by Renee Hsia, M.D.. She is an associate professor of Emergency Medicine and Health Policy at the UCSF Medical School. Hsia and her colleagues compared charges for 10 common clinical laboratory tests that were reported in 2011 by all non-federal California hospitals. (more…)

University of Texas Researchers Reveal a Portable Cancer Detection Device with the Potential to Significantly Reduce the Number of Skin Biopsies Sent to Dermatopathologists

Team of bioengineers succeeds in putting three different imaging technologies into a handheld probe that could be used by physicians to assess skin lesions in their offices

Dermatopathologists and pathology practice administrators will be keenly interested in a new, hand-held diagnostic device that is designed to reduce the need for skin biopsies. Because of high volume of skin biopsies referred to pathologists, any significant reduction in the number of such case referrals would have negative revenue impact on medical laboratories  that process and diagnose these specimens.

This innovative work was done at the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering. The research team developed a probe that uses three different light modalities to detect melanoma and other skin cancer lesions in real-time, according to a news release.
(more…)

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