Healthcare transparency news from FierceHealthcare

Virtually every hospital faces at least some issues in working with immigrants who don't speak English. That's particularly true in states that face a particularly large flow of new immigrants, like California. Hospitals there are responding with new programs to meet the steadily increasing demand.

At UC Davis Medical Center, for example, they're handling the problem by establishing a special program designed to connect bilingual nurses with patients who need them. Under the …

New research suggests OB/GYN fees and availability vary substantially across the United States. According to research by healthcare comparison shopping site Vimo.com, average OB/GYN DRGs can vary by 2,200 percent depending on the zip code in which the physician is based. The group looked at specific DRGs and compared them across the country. For example, DRG 358 (Uterine & Adnexa Procedure for non-malignancy CC) cost was $4,123 in Salisbury, MD, but …

Health price and quality reporting may have started out a trendy insider notion, but it looks like those days are firmly over. Pushed by the growth of consumer-driven healthcare plans, consumers have begun to expect--often, to demand--detailed data from providers. Nearly 85 percent of consumers responding to a new survey said that they believed hospitals and doctors should be required to disclose their prices. And more than half of those responding said that they'd be influenced by such …

Hanging tough in the face of furious physician criticism, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas has kicked off a program allowing beneficiaries to compare physician ratings. The health plan is the largest in the state, with more than 40,000 participating physician and 3.4 million beneficiaries, so its decisions have a significant effect on the market as a whole, making the ratings a major issue for the state's doctors.

The BCBS quality score currently uses 38 measures, and will add …

Geisinger Health System is seeing some success with an intriguing experiment in packaging up services at a flat fee. Following a model pushed by proponents of "value-driven" healthcare, Geisinger has established a flat fee for some surgeries that includes not only follow-up care, but also treatment for any complications that arise. The program, which focuses on elective heart bypass surgery, has been in place since February 2006. To make sure they didn't end up providing lots of extra …

Bowing to the pressures created by the consumer-driven healthcare trend, the Tennessee Hospital Association has created a website offering service prices for most of its 136 member hospitals. The site, which draws on data reported to the state from October 2003 to September 2004, list average prices for common procedures. HCA hospitals aren't included in the tally, but the site does link to HCA's own price disclosure sites. (HCA recently decided to disclose prices for common procedures at …

The Texas Hospital Association (THA) has become the latest industry group to promote price transparency and allow for comparison shopping, joining Wisconsin, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire and several other states with similar initiatives in place. To accomplish this objective, the THA has launched a new site, Texas PricePoint, which pulls together charge data on the most common inpatient services provided by Texas hospitals. …

A group of new bills currently progressing in the Pennsylvania state legislature could change the way the state's consumers shop for healthcare. The bills, which are part of an overall health reform push by Gov. Ed Rendell (D), include a measure requiring the state's pharmacies to submit their retail prices on the 150 most popular drugs to the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. This measure would also call for the state to launch a hospital payment registry, which would …

A large California health purchasing group is joining hands with some of the state's large health plans and Medicare to produce report cards on individual physician performance. The effort, which is led by the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH), will draw data from Medicare, Blue Cross Blue Shield of California and PacifiCare/UnitedHealth to create the report cards. The effort is part …

HCA has decided to roll with the transparency trend. Over the next few months the hospital chain will begin making prices for its services publicly available, starting with hospitals in Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. HCA expects to start disclosing prices in Tennessee over the next few months, and should roll out the program to all of its 165 U.S. hospitals by this summer. Prospective patients will be able to check out prices for common procedures by following a link on the …