Christine Jordan Sexton
Florida’s premier website for information about all health care facilities, including ownership information and state inspection reports and complaints, has gotten about 1.15 million views in the last 20 months, an advisory panel on health data transparency learned Wednesday.
Florida Center for Health Information and Transparency Bureau Chief Nikole Helvey told members of the Consumer Health Information and Policy Advisory Council there has been “significant utilization” of the FloridaHealthFinder website.
Helvey said the state was “definitely continuing our outreach” to promote its availability, adding that the communications staff at the Agency for Health Care Administration was promoting the website on a near daily basis on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
“We are getting a lot of good responses from that,” she told council members.
The FloridaHealthFinder website can be used to obtain information on all licensed health facilities from abortion clinics to nursing homes to state run institutions for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The webpage also contains scores of links for consumers to tap into other state-maintained information.
Helvey did not tell advisory council members how many visitors have clicked on a sister website, FloridaPriceFinder. The Agency for Health Care Administration did not immediately respond to Florida Politics’ request for the information after the meeting.
But at least in its early stages, it wasn’t proving popular with consumers or health insurance companies.
FloridaPriceFinder was championed by former Gov. Rick Scott as a way to improve health care access to residents by making pricing information for health care services available to consumers.
The Consumer Health Information and Policy Advisory Council is created in statute and directed to to assist AHCA in reviewing the comprehensive health information system, including the collection and sharing of health-related data, fraud and abuse data, and professional and facility licensing data among federal, state, local, and private entities. The council is also responsible for recommending improvements for purposes of public health, policy analysis, health information exchange and transparency of consumer health care information.
Halvey told council members the state is “wrapping up” its claims data collection for calendar year 2020. She said they started collecting the data July 1, which allows time for the claims from the previous year to be filed.
The state is analyzing the data and running quality checks on it to ensure its integrity before it refreshes the data on the PriceFinder website.
“The good news,” Helvey said, “is we have last year’s refresh staged and ready to go.”
Helvey said the PriceFinder website will be updated in the “next few weeks” with the 2019 price data.
One comment
Alex
September 29, 2021 at 3:54 pm
Quality of care info is great, but prices don’t matter much considering we in the US already pay 25-33% more for the same services as compared to the rest of the 1st world countries for no better than average quality care.
The difference?
Their governments are involved in setting service levels and prices, and it’s impossible to argue they do a bad job since they’ve been doing a consistently much better job for years now.
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