FAIR Health Launches Expanded Spanish-Language Consumer Website
September 20, 2018
This month, FAIR Health launched fairhealthconsumidor.org, a newly expanded Spanish-language version of our free, award-winning, healthcare cost transparency website for consumers. FAIR Health Consumidor enables Spanish-speaking Hispanics/Latinos to better understand and plan their healthcare costs. With generous support from The New York Community Trust (The Trust), the mobile-optimized site has been redesigned and augmented to include all the features of FAIR Health’s recently revised English-language consumer site, fairhealthconsumer.org.
Because open enrollment season, the period when consumers can enroll in or make changes to a health plan, begins this fall, clear information about health insurance and healthcare costs is especially valuable now. FAIR Health Consumidor’s cost lookup tool, which is powered by FAIR Health’s database of billions of billed medical and dental claims, allows Spanish-speaking consumers to estimate their medical or dental costs for particular procedures in their geographic areas. The tool takes into account whether they are insured or uninsured—and if insured, whether they are seeking in-network care, i.e., within their plans’ networks, or are seeking care out of network. New features include:
- Typical in-network rates for thousands of medical procedures in the consumer’s locale, so consumers can estimate how much they will have to pay their in-network providers for care before they meet their deductibles;
- Total and itemized costs of 25 common “bundles” or episodes of care that involve multiple procedures related to a single medical condition, such as diabetes, or a complex procedure, such as a hip replacement;
- A toolkit explaining how to use healthcare quality measures to make informed decisions about care;
- Expanded educational resources with more articles on health insurance and healthcare costs;
- Videos showing the usefulness of the site for researching costs on different health conditions; and
- A fresh design and easy-to-use interface.
In addition, residents of New York State will find, for 100 commonly performed procedures, a listing of thousands of New York State-based healthcare providers with information about their practices and prices. For scores of hospitals in selected regions in the state, the site lists facility pricing for a set of outpatient procedures and detailed quality metrics. Within New York City, FAIR Health will conduct a multifaceted, culturally relevant marketing campaign designed to reach the city’s Hispanic/Latino population.
FAIR Health President Robin Gelburd commented: “The Hispanic/Latino community is disproportionately uninsured and faces linguistic and cultural barriers to understanding health insurance. We are excited to offer new Spanish-language consumer tools to help them make informed decisions about managing their healthcare and preparing for its costs.”
Irfan Hasan, program director of The Trust’s Healthy Lives, stated: “Improving healthcare is not simply about seeing the doctor—it is also about managing the associated costs and understanding how health insurance works. With this new website, Hispanic/Latino communities will have access to a new level of information so they can safeguard their health and their wallets.”
For information on licensing FAIR Health’s consumer tools or creating a private-label version of our consumer sites, email us at info@fairhealth.org or call us at 855-301-3247, Monday through Friday, 9 am to 6 pm ET.