UnitedHealth puts robust price transparency tools in consumers' hands

Tools

FHP: Do these tools help drive consumers to high-quality doctors?

Bogatyrenko: When you get into the cost estimator itself, the tool presents consumers with quality information. We actually have a certified quality and efficiency evaluation program [certified by the National Committee on Quality and Assurance] across many physician specialties. What the tool will do is reflect which of those physicians have met our standards for quality and efficiency and lists them as Tier 1. There's an icon that identifies Tier 1 providers, and there's information embedded in the tool to explain what Tier 1 means.

Consumers can also get information about each doctor's education background, demographics and directions to office. We're looking now at the ability to include consumer experience measures into the tool. We're doing that because, frankly, consumes have told us that while the objective quality measures are important, once they've narrowed down their choices to one or two physicians, they want other people's experience with a particular doctor. We anticipate that will come online late this year or early next year.

FHP: Do you have any data on how many people are downloading and/or are using the Health4Me app?

Bogatyrenko: We expect this year to be at about 3 million consumer log-ins into Health4Me. Last year, we were at about 2.5 million log-ins. So that number continues to grow and obviously the downloads continue to grow. What we find is that there's a core group of individuals who tend to be, for lack of a better word, frequent or heavy users of the Health4Me app. Those who use it tend to come back again and again. We're studying the characteristics of that frequent user group so we can do a better job of not only meeting their needs but also promoting the tool.

FHP: How long did it take to develop this tool?

Bogatyrenko: We had a good base to work from because we had an existing tool. Our focus was on redesigning the experience to make it easy and simple to navigate and also provide a lot of extra content. We did reengineer the cost estimate process so that our estimates are precise to the contracted rate we have with that doctor. It took about nine months from beginning to end. We spent time iterating and sharing versions with our employer customers and individual consumers to get their feedback and make sure we were incorporating all of the information they were looking for. We are continuing to work with consumers and, later this year, the myHealthcare Cost Estimator will get a new design based on consumer feedback. So we're redesigning the entire experience to make it simpler and easier to move through.