Advancing Cost Transparency by Private-Labeling FAIR Health Consumer

July 18, 2019

For many organizations, healthcare cost transparency is an increasingly important issue. A growing number of state and federal laws and regulations aim at making healthcare costs more transparent to patients. At the same time, patients are being asked to shoulder a greater share of costs and navigate an exceedingly complex healthcare system. Payors, providers, state government agencies and others want to advance cost transparency, but creating transparency tools from scratch poses challenges. Many organizations have come to rely on licensing or private-labeling the award-winning tools on fairhealthconsumer.org.

Widely Honored Transparency Tools

A pioneer in cost transparency, FAIR Health has been honored nationwide for FAIR Health Consumer, our easy-to-use consumer website available in English and Spanish online and as a mobile app. The site has won praise from industry and government leaders, has been recognized in hundreds of media outlets nationwide as a critical tool for consumer engagement and has received numerous honors and awards.

FAIR Health Consumer empowers consumers to estimate medical and dental care costs by procedure and geographic location, using the FH® Medical Cost Estimator and the FH® Dental Cost Estimator. The site also puts the costs in context with a rich educational curriculum. The site provides:

  • In- and out-of-network medical care cost estimates;
  • A geo-compare feature that shows medical cost estimates in adjacent areas;
  • Itemized and total costs (both in- and out-of-network) for 25 common episodes of care;
  • Out-of-network and allowed cost estimates for dental care;
  • For 100 commonly performed procedures in New York State, a listing of providers with information about their prices and practices;
  • For a subset of hospitals in selected areas of New York State, pricing for a set of outpatient procedures and various quality metrics;
  • FH® Insurance Basics, a series of original articles and videos explaining how health coverage works in easy-to-understand language; and
  • Resource links, a glossary and a healthcare quality toolkit.

Customizing FAIR Health Consumer

Organizations use the data and content on FAIR Health Consumer to create a private-label version of the site with their own branding, “look and feel” and messaging. Options include:

  • Making the full consumer site available to members or patients, customized with the organization’s branding;
  • Licensing our cost-lookup tools to provide customer service teams or other staff with immediate access to cost estimates for thousands of medical and/or dental procedures;
  • Licensing our educational curriculum, branded for the organization, including any of our specific FH Insurance Basics articles and videos, as well as our resource links and glossary; and
  • Incorporating our cost data in the organization’s member tools via an application programming interface (API).

FAIR Health automatically refreshes the cost information in private-label websites at least twice annually, and regularly adds to the site’s educational content and features.

For more information on licensing or private-labeling FAIR Health’s consumer transparency resources, contact us by email at info@fairhealth.org or call us at 855-301-3247, Monday through Friday, 9 am to 6 pm ET.