Advancing Greater Awareness of Price Transparency Tools and Information: What Congress Can Do
The Senate’s Health Care Transparency Initiative recently asked stakeholders for feedback. As part of Freedman HealthCare’s response outlining recommendations to maximize the opportunity of APCDs, this post focuses on the most effective methods to connect consumers with this data.
Current Approaches to Publicize Price and Quality Transparency Websites:
- Launch events
- Ongoing social media postings
- Press releases
But, as with any product or service, effective marketing drives interest. Here’s three highly-effective tweaks to those common strategies:
Talk like a person: Especially on social media, get rid of the public health speak. Your neighbor never says “transparency.” They say, “You won’t believe how much this cost.” Or, “The hospital wasn’t clean and was too loud.”
Use inexpensive social media ads to maximize reach: A low-cost ad on Facebook can greatly maximize the number of people that see the post and highly-targeted ads get the right eyes on the right pages.
Partner with trusted networks: Find places and organizations where your target audience already congregates and meet them there – virtually and in person. Find the “leaders” and connect with them.
Now that you’ve got them there, keep them there.
Best Practices in Site Design:
- Offer drilldown capability like the New Hampshire HealthCost website, which returns user data based on information about insurance and preferred travel distance
- Show specific providers, as on CompareMaine.org, nhhealthcost.nh.gov, and the forth coming Colorado websites
- Use minimal number of clicks to reach the answer on the website
- Optimize for mobile devices, many users access information through a phone or tablet.
To reach our full response to the Cassidy Initiative click here.