Private medical insurers (PMIs) are demanding healthcare providers including hospital groups and clinicians speed up compliance with requirements to publish data about patient outcomes and practitioner fees.
The call came in the Private Healthcare Information Network’s (PHIN) roadmap to deliver the Competition and Market Authority’s (CMA) order to increase transparency in the sector and empower customers.
The roadmap also reveals PHIN plans to implement a new approach to publishing consultant fee arrangements via its portal next year which will help the private medical insurance (PMI) sector.
The CMA has criticised the private healthcare sector for the slow pace of progress in publishing data since it made the order in 2014 and the PHIN warned the industry was a “long way” off being compliant.
The PHIN plan acknowledged that as funders, insurers represented a large proportion of patients using private healthcare and that they wanted a quicker response from the industry to help their customers.
“PMIs would like to see an increased pace of delivery of the order which can support their customers. PHIN will look at how best to publish information that can support this objective,” PHIN said.
As part of the CMA order insurers are required to promote PHIN and the information it provides to customers at the relevant points in their treatment journey.
As such PHIN agreed insurers have a crucial role in positive engagement with hospitals and consultants that encourages participation.
“PHIN will continue to work with the PMI providers to ensure that patients are made aware of and invited to the information PHIN publishes to support patient choices, and to make sure the information PHIN publishes is relevant to insured patients,” it said.
“There is scope for further involvement from PMIs in encouraging provider and consultant participation and engagement.
“PMIs are an inherent part of the private healthcare sector, and we all need to harness the benefits we can bring for patients.”
It added that PMIs can bring a “voice of the patient” perspective in the design of the information to be published to ensure it is understandable and genuinely supports patient choice.
For more on the plan: CMA increases oversight and criticises private healthcare providers for delays to publishing fee and outcome data – Health & Protection (healthcareandprotection.com), ‘Step-change’ needed as private healthcare ‘long way’ off data compliance – PHIN – Health & Protection (healthcareandprotection.com).
