The Health Care Cost Institute launches Guroo
February 28, 2015
Back in May of last year, I was excited to learn that three major insurers were banding together to make health care prices available to consumers. There seemed like there was so much potential. This past week, The Health Care Cost Institute announced that their portal launched as Guroo.com. It turns out to be a rather modest step -- currently, it only gives average pricing by location, and only for seventy or so conditions . Granted, this is only the launch, and the press release hints at much more to come. However, this data seems available via some other sites, and this release falls far short of what the portal could do with the data that they have (e.g. price comparison among providers).
At this point, the rationale for these insurers to release this information remains unclear. Do they actually want to change the provider industry by helping patients make more informed healthcare purchasing decisions (which in turn should lower their costs)? If so, releasing the information at the individual provider level makes a lot of sense. It would make even more sense to release this data so that other tools can also harness it to benefit the patient community. Do they want to build and control their own popular consumer-facing portal (as someone from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation suggested they have the potential to do)? Do they want something that they can point to in the realm of healthcare transparency for the sake of appearance? We'll see how the site develops, and how they respond to competitive websites.