assessment #2 Class1

Health care Organizations are facing a number of problems and costs and transparency is a common problem faced. Cost and transparency mean that there is implementation of strategies and tactics to address growth of medical and pharmaceutical costs and impacts to access and quality of care.

IDENTIFYING ACADEMIC PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLE

I accessed articles from google scholar, a database that provides a simple way broadly search for scholarly literature, I used keywords such as “health care problems,” and “cost and transparency,” to search for peer-reviewed literature relevant to cost and transparency. By use of the advanced search option, I searched for only scholarly and peer-reviewed journals, choosing “journal article” as the publication type, “physicians” and “nurses” as the subjects and articles published within the last five years as the data range.

ASSESSING CREDIBILITY AND RELEVANCE OF THE INFORMATION SOURCES

I selected peer-viewed journal articles that were published within the last five years to ensure credibility. I ensured the authors of the articles that I selected were based on the health care field and had extensive professional experience. For relevance of the information to my topic, I confirmed that the articles contained accepted facts and opinions on issues relating to cost and transparency. I also ensured that the information sources had clearly defined purposes and contained appropriate information about cost and transparency.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Craig, B, Joshua, M, Barak, G, Kevin, J & Thomas, H, (2019), The effect of Medication Cost Transparency alerts on Prescriber Behavior, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Associations 26(10), 920-927

The purpose of this journal was to determine if medication cost transparency alerts provided at time of prescribing led ambulatory prescribers to reduce their use of low-value medications. The authors cite reports analysis, was that a total of 15 456 prescription for high-cost medications were written during the baseline period including 7223 in the intervention arm and 8233 in the control arm. During the intervention period, a decrease in daily prescribing volume was noted for high-cost medications. The hypothesis states that medication cost transparency directly impacts prescriber behavior. In conclusion, medication cost transparency alerts in an ambulatory setting led to more cost-conscious prescribing. Future work is needed to predict which alerts will be most effective. This article is relevant to my topic on cost and transparency as a health care problem because it associates cost transparency to prescriber behavior.

This article represents and synthesizes results from studies on using recommender systems to reduce health care costs at prescription time, while taking time pressure into account. The subjects were real practicing physicians, nurse practitioners or physician assistants. Across these studies, a total of 160 medical practitioners used a system that provides recommendations for medications along with associated cost information. The main finding was a general tendency among practitioners to reduce health care costs by prescribing lower cost medications when cost information is provided by a recommender system. The time pressure faced daily by prescribers, however, appears to impact the use of recommendations by nurse practitioners and physician assistants more than it does to physicians. These results have significant implications for cost reduction in health care and for the design of effective real time health care recommender systems, the article is relevant because it focuses on reduction of health care cost transparency at prescription time.

There is increasing interest in using price transparency tools to decrease spending in health care. The objective of the article was to measure the association between offering a health care price transparency tool and outpatient spending. Two large employers represented in multiple market areas across the United States offered an online health care price transparency tool to their employees. One introduced it on April 1,2011, and the other on January 1, 2012. The tool provides users information about what they would pay out of pockets for services from different physicians, hospitals or other clinical sites. Using a matched difference-in differences design, outpatient spending among employees offered the tool (n=148 655) was compared with that among employees from other companies not offered the tool (n=295 983) in the year before and after it was introduced.

The authors cite reports analysis, mean outpatient spending among employees offered the tool was $2021 in the year before the tool was introduced and $2233 in the year after. Being offered the price transparency tool was associated with a mean increase in out-of-pocket spending after adjusting relevant factors. This article concludes that among employees at two large companies, offering a price transparency tool was not associated with lower health care spending. This article is relevant because it measures the association between offering a health care price transparency tool and outpatient spending.

CONCLUSION

Transparency can improve quality, safety and efficiency due to competition and the availability of clinical benchmarks. For example, patients are usually called to provide a cost estimate for high price hospital services especially the emergency room patients. Being transparent about prices enhances patients’ experience. Patients are most likely to pay if they understand how much they can afford.

References

Craig, B, Joshua, M, Barak, G, Kevin, J & Thomas, H, (2019), The effect of Medication Cost Transparency alerts on Prescriber Behavior, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Associations 26(10), 920-927