VentureBeat

For empowered “medical consumers” to really transform the healthcare system, as Health 2.0 proponents would have, clear pricing and quality data for medical care is essential. Unfortunately, such information is currently in short supply.

The startup change:healthcare aims to fill that void with a revamped Web site, just launched this afternoon. And it’s a nifty idea, if unfortunately still flawed in execution. See our review at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

Can social networking help restrain, or even lower, healthcare costs? The Nashville, Tenn., startup change:healthcare is primed to find out.

Healthcare plans are inexorably forcing more cost-sharing on patients — a strategy some call YOYO, for “you’re on your own” — which means that the actual cost of medical care is looming larger for many Americans. Healthcare free-marketers think that’s a good thing, arguing that cost-consciousness will make people better medical consumers and cut down on the overuse of costly services. Their counterparts, meanwhile, worry that fewer people will be able to afford decent care and that individuals motivated to scrimp on medical care will tend to forego preventive check-ups that could catch serious conditions early, thus actually driving up costs over the long run.

Either way, we’re all likely to have to start paying more attention to what our medical care costs, not least because higher deductibles, coinsurance and co-payments are probably going to saddle us with a larger share of the bill. Yet medical pricing is murky to the point of almost complete opacity, since it’s difficult and at times almost impossible to find out what doctors or hospitals actually charge for an appointment or a procedure. Even then, costs can vary widely depending on how old a patient is, where she lives, whether she’s insured or not, and even what hospital or pharmacy she happens to step into.

It’s this informational void that change:healthcare hopes to address with a freshly revamped site that’s just gone live. The new service wraps together the startup’s previous two Health 2.0 services –MedBillManager, a subscription service for helping people manage complex medical bills, and FindYourDoc.com, a physician directory that change:healthcare took down several months back in anticipation of the redesign — and bolsters its social-network aspects, particularly the ability of users to share medical-cost information and rate their doctors or hospitals. The ultimate idea is to build up a database — one supplemented by data from employer healthcare billings, Medicare and other sources — that can help anyone shop around for high quality but inexpensive medical care.

We’ve covered change:healthcare in the past — see here and here, for instance — but I held off reviewing its offerings in light of the pending redesign. That was probably just as well, since FindYourDoc in particular had a slapdash feel to it, thanks to some odd display quirks and some gaps in hospital data that probably weren’t the site’s fault (it relied heavily on Medicare data at the time) but which were disconcerting nonetheless.

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