title: Crowdsourcing healthcare costs: Opportunities and challenges for patient centered price transparency.
abstract: Efforts to improve health care price transparency have garnered significant attention from patients, policy makers, and health insurers. In response to increasing consumer demand, state governments, insurance plans, and health care providers are reporting health care prices. However, such data often do not provide consumers with the most salient information: their own actual out-of-pocket cost for medical care. Although untested, crowdsourcing, a mechanism for the public to help answer complex questions, represents a potential solution to the problem of opaque hospital costs. This article explores, the challenges and potential opportunities for crowdsourcing out-of-pocket costs for healthcare consumers.
authors.affiliation: Center for Emergency Care Policy Research, Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA; Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Electronic address: zfmamp.wharton@upenn.edu.
authors.forename: Zachary F
authors.initials: ZF
authors.lastname: Meisel
authors.affiliation: Center for Emergency Care Policy Research, Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA; Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Lauren A Houdek
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: VonHoltz
authors.affiliation: Center for Emergency Care Policy Research, Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA; Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA; Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Raina M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Merchant
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce; D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D063045:Crowdsourcing; D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D016527:Drug Costs; D017048:Health Care Costs; D005102:Health Expenditures; D017721:Hospital Costs; D006801:Humans; D014481:United States
keywords: Crowdsourcing; Hospital charge data; Out-of-pocket cost; Price transparency