Some of you may know about my quest for real time price transparency in healthcare.

Vanessa has just built her first app worthy of the Apple app store called Crowd¢entsing. It’s not yet real time price transparency. But it’s a click in that direction. The app provides Medicare billing data and amounts paid to hospitals in California. Her next version will include other states as well.

Crowd¢entsing provides a data snapshot. It comes from Medicare data made available by the US Federal Government in 2013, and it includes the top 100 diagnosis-related groups (DRGs).

FOR PROVIDERS:

We hope Crowd¢entsing will help you to evaluate where your prices land amongst your competitors. Because you may not know what your competitors are charging and how they are being reimbursed, we hope access to such information will help you to refine your charge masters. Maybe you will use this to increase some of your low-lying outliers. However, we hope you will also use this information to bring some of your higher charges closer to the mean.

FOR THE PUBLIC:

Crowd¢entsing gives you a glimpse into medical charges for a wide variety of medical services. If you have Medicare coverage, pay closer attention to the “amount paid” because your copayment may be a percentage of this amount. However, if you are uninsured “amount billed” is far more important for you. Of course, you cannot evaluate quality of care using our data. However, if you are considering an elective procedure, we hope this information will help you make more informed decisions regarding where you may seek your medical care.

If you have an iPhone, please download Crowd¢entsing app and give us your input.