New online health shopping tool to cut your company’s costs

Your employees will soon be equipped with an online health shopping tool to make smarter, more informed healthcare choices … and save your company money as a result.

Starting Jan. 11, 2022, health insurers must provide a publicly available, updated data file on costs via an online self-service shopping tool.

That way your plan participants can shop and compare costs for services before receiving care for procedures, drugs and medical equipment. That in turn will save your company money.

The changes come courtesy of President Trump’s 2019 executive order, Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First.

The Federal Register recently published the order. Here’s what you need to know and how it will benefit your bottom line.

A timetable for the online health shopping tool

Here’s when insurers will need to provide the necessary info during the phase-in period. That way you’ll know what to expect, and when, from the new online health shopping tool:

• 2022: Insurers will make available costs of various procedures, letting tech firms design apps so folks can see costs on their own plan, as well as other insurers’ plans.
• 2023: Insurers will make available to their enrollees cost-sharing details on 500 “shoppable services.” Those include mammograms, physician visits, colonoscopies, plus various blood tests, biopsies and X-rays.
• 2024: Insurers will make cost-sharing data available on all services they cover. Procedures, drugs and durable medical equipment all count.