A Guide to Display Provider Quality Information and Involving Consumers in Generating Provider Ratings for Consumer Driven Health Plans Web Site

Abstract

Provider’s quality information is one of the most important pieces of information that a consumer seeks out when searching for a health care provider. Most often, a consumer finds a provider by word of mouth from friends or relatives. This approach has its benefit but often times it does not work because each individual consumer has his or her own priority and likings. The ideal approach would be to have a web tool that provides quality ratings for providers from claim information as well as from consumer feedback. Current tools in the market do not involve the consumer intricately enough to generate provider ratings. These tools also do not provide adequate information about providers upon which a user can make an informed decision regarding providers for their treatments.

This paper will discuss a prototype web user interface(UI) where a consumer can lookup a provider by various criteria and view quality ratings information. A process will be outlined on how to involve the consumer in generating provider ratings. Quality metrics will be suggested upon which quality ratings could be assigned to health care providers in order to aid the consumer in the decision making process.