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In
his first address on the state of our Union, President Obama mentioned
an alarming statistic: every 30 seconds an American family is
bankrupted by medical bills. To make matters worse, many medical tests and treatments do not help patients get better and inflate bills unnecessarily.
Healthcare providers ultimately determine how 90% of healthcare dollars are spent. However, they usually do not know how their decisions impact what patients pay.
The reason is painfully simple: information on the prices patients face is rarely available at the point of care.
Costs of Care will
solve this problem by using information technology
to show providers prices at the critical moment when medical decisions
are made.
The economic downturn
has focused considerable political attention on using information
technology to alleviate unnecessary medical costs. Our efforts come at
a time when one in three Americans struggle to pay their medical bills.
“We seem to have as much as $700 billion a year
in health care tests and services that are unnecessary, that don't
improve health outcomes, and that just add to costs both for the
federal government and for workers without making anyone healthier. The
way to get at that has been started in the stimulus bill in which we invest [$20 billion] in health information technology, we start to better measure what works and what doesn't, and we start to pay for better care rather than more care.”
 Peter Orszag, Director of the White House Office of Management & Budget.
February 19th, 2009
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