LibreHealth Cost-of-Care Explorer: Mobile Application for Patient-friendly Access to Hospital Chargemasters

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) mandated that Charge Description Master (CDM) be available online in a machine-readable format by January 1, 2019. These changes were made to increase availability of hospital price information in order to provide patients with more access to their health information and allow physicians to spend more time with their patients. However, the mandated machine-readable formats make it impossible for a patient to interpret the pricing and hence limit price transparency. To bridge this gap, we developed a mobile application that can be used by patients to reveal the cost of a medical procedure or service before receiving it. Patients are able to compare the costs of medical procedures available in surrounding hospitals by viewing the hospital’s CDM and determine which hospital delivers the best care/medical procedures at the best price.Clinical relevance—The LibreHealth cost-of-care explorer app presents the cost of medical procedures in a consumer-friendly format. It provides patient-friendly cost estimates for medical procedures performed in US hospitals and promotes price transparency to the end users.