Modern Healthcare interviewed Manatt's Joel Ario, a managing director with Manatt Health, on how the health insurance exchanges could have better technological tools to offer accurate provider information.
Modern Healthcare reports that industry experts and consumer advocates have faulted the exchanges for not providing clear, accurate and up-to-date information to consumer about which providers are on the health plans offered. In a recent survey conducted by Commonwealth Fund, 25 percent of adults who selected a plan did not know whether their plan had a narrow network, and 39 percent overall didn't know which doctors were included on their plan.
Ario said an important advance would be in predictive, personalized algorithms like Amazon's or Google's. In the future, he speculated, you might see patients upload their electronic health records to the exchange and have an algorithm point out which of their providers were in each plan's network, as well as each network's overall level of specialists who treat their particular medical conditions.
"You're never going to get the average consumer to understand all this detail," Ario said. "You actually need people who are very skilled at creating the algorithms and other kinds of data analysis tools that help people sort these things out and put things in very simple terms."
Read the article here.