Online ads increased consumer awareness of price transparency, but little action
Researchers have concluded that "structural factors" are keeping consumers for shopping for health services, not lack of awareness.
Increasing health care price transparency has long been considered a key to reduced spending. The challenge, however, is that consumers often seem oblivious to price-transparency tools that can help them estimate prices before receiving services.
In an effort to determine whether low consumer engagement is due to a lack of interest or a lack of awareness, a group of researchers in the Northeast conducted an experiment centered around a high-profile Google Ads campaign that informed consumers about New Hampshire’s price transparency website, NH HealthCost.
Related: Even doctors aren’t very good at shopping for health care
“Our campaign led to more than [a] 600% increase in visits to the website,” the researchers note, writing in the March issue of Health Affairs. “However, in our analysis of health plan claims, this increased use of the website did not translate to increased use of lower-priced providers.”
They concluded that the limited success of price transparency tools “is driven by structural factors that limit consumers’ ability to use health care price information” rather than unawareness of price transparency tools. “Our findings provide a cautionary note for those who believe that the availability of price information alone will reduce patients’ spending,” the researchers wrote, citing numerous barriers for consumers to use price information.
Such barriers include:
- Not knowing the details of their benefits package to determine their out-of-pocket costs
- A lack of incentive to choose lower-price care, even among consumers with high-deductible health plans
- Higher priority placed on factors other than health care prices when choosing a provider
“It may also be that despite the website being accessed by many people, the ad campaign might not have reached the optimal audience — those who were most likely to be price-sensitive and those who went on to receive health care services,” the researchers wrote, concluding that while price transparency might not drive greater use of lower-price providers, it could have other benefits. “Patients may be more aware of their out-of-pocket expenses ahead of time, and they may be able to plan accordingly. [This] data can be used in negotiations between insurers and providers and lead to lower prices.”
The research team consisted of Sunita M. Desai, an assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City; Sonali Shambhu, an advanced analytic analyst at HealthCore Inc. in Wilmington, Del.; and Ateev Mehrotra, an associate professor of health care policy and medicine in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School in Boston. A total of $39,060 was spent on the advertising campaign over a six-month period in 2019.
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