Northwestern University Obtains License to FAIR Health Consumer Website

April 19, 2018

Northwestern University has become the first educational institution to license the use of FAIR Health’s award-winning FAIR Health Consumer website. The agreement provides students, faculty and staff access for curricular planning, lectures, case studies, homework, classroom presentations and other educational purposes. Northwestern’s Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago initiated the collaboration with the aim of using the website in the medical classroom and clinical training. The use of the FAIR Health Consumer platform complements the use of FAIR Health data by numerous academic institutions for health systems research and public health studies.

Powered by FAIR Health’s repository of billions of private healthcare claims, FAIR Health Consumer allows consumers to estimate their in-network and out-of-network expenses for medical procedures in local geographic areas, as well as out-of-network costs for dental procedures (estimated in-network dental costs are due to be added later this year). The site also offers estimated total and itemized costs of 25 common episodes of care, and a rich educational curriculum that includes articles on insurance basics, a glossary, videos, resource links and information on healthcare quality measures.

FAIR Health regards the licensing of FAIR Health Consumer to Northwestern as a model for future collaboration with educational institutions.

“We are pleased to make FAIR Health Consumer available to Northwestern,” said FAIR Health President Robin Gelburd. “We look forward to continuing to promote price transparency and health insurance literacy, especially in environments where the physicians and public health professionals of the next generation are being groomed. We think this model could be of value to other institutions recognizing the importance of integrating cost transparency and consumer engagement into medical and public health training.”