Morning Read: Why price transparency in healthcare is overdue

Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:

Why price transparency in health care is long overdue: Writing at KevinMD, Chicago internist Dr. Leslie Ramirez makes the case for why price transparency in healthcare is so desperately needed. One of Ramirez’s patients, who also happens to be her mother, lost her job and was just under the cutoff age for Medicare and knew she needed a mammogram. However, the patient skipped it, balking at the hefty $400 price tag from her usual caregiver, unaware that another local hospital offers mammograms for $67. The anecdote illustrates that health care isn’t like other goods and products–for example, it’s pretty easy to comparison shop for a plasma TV by heading to a bunch of electronics websites. With healthcare, it’s just not that straightforward to shop for coronary bypass surgery and that’s why the conservative solution of “Let the free markets do their thing” simply won’t work when it comes to healthcare.

Incidents like the one above inspired Dr. Ramirez to admirably create her own site, LesliesList.org, that aims to make comparison shopping for prescriptions and tests easier for Chicagoans. It may not do you much good if you’re not from Chicago, but it’s a start, and perhaps Ramirez’s work will motivate other health providers to do the same in their cities. Ramirez seems to view affordability as a moral issue facing doctors:

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As docs, we MUST ask our patients if they can afford the medicines and testing that we are prescribing. And we must help them find a way to afford them, or find an alternative, if at all possible.

Another chink in the armor of EMRs: In two excellent posts, the blog Health Care Renewal has some strong and harsh words for purveyors of electronic medical records. In the first, the blog examines a recent study in Health Affairs that assessed data from about 3,000 community hospitals in an attempt to ascertain the effect of EMRs on the quality of patient care. The results? Not so good. The relationship between EMR adoption and quality was “modest at best” and lacking statistical significance, the researchers say. For example, hospitals with EMRs showed minimal difference in measures like length of stay and prevention of surgical infection compared to those that haven’t adopted the technology. The blog lays the blame squarely at the feet of the health IT industry, which needs to improve “its methodologies for health IT development and validation, its qualifications for leadership, and its regulation.”

In a subsequent post, the blog takes aim at the head of a health IT trade group who claims EMRs are “primarily designed for improving clinical outcomes, and a secondary benefit is that they improve administrative efficiencies.” The blog then points to a compiled list of articles and studies, asserting that EMRs, in fact, do neither. As I’ve noted before, until EMR systems are improved to the point that they help doctors do their jobs better and more efficiently–and we may get there some day–their promise will go unfulfilled as means of improving care in the U.S.

Healthcare the apple of VCs eyes: While the first quarter was indeed an ugly one for venture capital, with fundraising plummeting to 1993 levels, there’s some good news for health companies. Among the investments made by venture capitalists, healthcare was the most popular sector in the first quarter, CB Insights reports. In the first quarter overall, VCs made 731 investments totaling $5.9 billion, both significant year-over-year increases. Healthcare companies were on the receiving end of 23 percent of those, compared with 21 percent to Internet firms. Of the 162 healthcare deals, just more than half of them went to companies in California and Massachusetts. When it came to money, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the big winner with deals totaling $131 million, followed by San Diego at $98 million.