As reported in this Healthcare Informatics article, The Health Care Cost Institute, a non-profit organization based in Washington D.C., is making data on healthcare costs from 40 million insure individuals available for use by consumers to help them understand pricing information for common health conditions and services.

As I have blogged about in the past, providing the consumer, referring physicians and employers with tools to help them make choices about where to get affordable and market competitive healthcare services will be a growing trend.

Of course, to measure the value of something based purely on the cost assumes the product or service is a commodity. In the world of medical imaging, this is not the case.

Should an imaging service provider that has 15 year old equipment, no radiation dose tracking or optimization program, no sub-specialized Radiologists, and no peer review program (for quality assurance and ongoing learning) be paid the same for a procedure as a service that has all of these things (and more)?

Unless there is some consideration of quality in calculating the value of the money spent on a service, like medical imaging, then prices will be driven down to a commodity level and there will be no funds available to invest in the tools and resources required to provide quality. The math of economics is pretty unemotional about this stuff.