Transparency Initiatives

The Price is Your Right Design Challenge CHIA collaborated with the Massachusetts eHealth Institute (MeHI), the Donaghue Foundation, the Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy, and Freedman HealthCare on an open call for designing healthcare shopper tools to help patients make more informed healthcare decisions. The challenge, using actual data from both CHIA and the New Hampshire Insurance Department, was to propose an easy-to-use mobile application or website to enable consumers to find information on health cost variation, quality ratings, and provider proximity. Price Is Your Right Challenge Winners Announcement

The Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) is an independent agency whose mission is to serve as a steward of Massachusetts health information to promote a more transparent and equitable health care system that effectively serves all residents of the Commonwealth. Our vision is a transparent health care system where reliable information provides common ground for improvement and empowers people and organizations to make informed decisions.

CHIA believes transparency means giving people access to the information they need to make better decisions. A comprehensive approach to transparency means sharing data has value for all participants in the health care system, including patients, policymakers, insurers, providers, employers, and researchers, and also the consultants and digital health companies that use data to serve these stakeholders.

Accordingly, CHIA is pursuing several separate but related transparency initiatives.

Consumer Transparency Website (MassCompareCare.gov)

CompareCare provides Massachusetts health care consumers with the guidance and tools they need to become active partners in their health care decisions. CompareCare's provides Massachusetts health care consumers with access to:

• A procedure pricing tool that uses claims data to show payer-specific provider payment data for 295 common health care services;

• Basic quality information about different types of providers;

• Support tools that help consumers as they work with their providers and insurers to make decisions about their care.

CHIA intends to update CompareCare on a regular basis, adding more extensive price data, new cost and quality metrics, and better decision support tools.

Bulk Release of Procedure Price Data

After careful consideration and many discussions with interested stakeholders, CHIA concluded that releasing all of the data behind CompareCare’s procedure pricing tool as a single, public dataset furthers CHIA’s mandate to promote transparency in the Massachusetts healthcare system. Access to that data can be found here.

While CompareCare was developed as a transparency website primarily for individual consumers, CHIA believes procedure price information has value for all participants in the healthcare system, including patients, policymakers, insurers, providers, employers, and researchers, and also the consultants and digital health companies that use data to serve these stakeholders.

CHIA intends to show payer-specific prices in future data releases. This proposed approach recognizes there is value in proceeding deliberatively to let stakeholders use the data and provide feedback before initiating the wholesale release of payer-specific prices.

CHIA’s fundamental objective in releasing this data is to make more information available to all healthcare stakeholders to support a broader, more informed public dialogue around health care costs and transparency.

CHIA also believes these initiatives will need iterative improvements for a period of time before they reach full maturity. The agency is committed to working with all health care stakeholders to understand the value of this data, how it can be improved, and how CHIA should pursue its statutory mandate to increase the transparency of the Massachusetts health care system.

Please contact CHIA for questions and comments on CHIA's transparency initiatives.