Empowered Patient Podcast Impact of Price Transparency on Determination of Treatment Options with Dr. Mukul Mehra IllumiCare
Dr. Mukul Mehra is the Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of IllumiCare and firmly believes that cost transparency should be given to physicians so that hard clinical decisions can put the cost of treatment into perspective. By providing real-time data, IllumiCare is influencing clinician behavior to reduce waste, lower costs and improve decisions about appropriate treatments.
Mukul explains, "So IllumiCare is essentially bringing in all of these constructs of different points in a patient's care journey in the inpatient setting, giving a cost definition to what that treatment is costing, and getting down to a real true cost. Then understanding that at different points in a treatment plan, that certainly there may not be proper adjudication. But if we don't start off with cost transparency, then we're not going to really get to define the cost of waste."
"When you aggregate data and make it retrospect, it tends to have very little influence or impact on physician practice patterns. And in the end, IllumiCare is a behavioral change company. And we want to change behavior by reducing costs, but we want to reduce costs when you can decelerate good therapy when you now only need a pretty good drug because that's good enough. And so the nuances of all of that are only going to occur when you give this information at the point-of-care, contextually, in real-time. And that's occurring over the electronic medical record for many of us in that data assimilation and review mode."
"It's most directly designed to influence physician/clinician behavior. It's EMR agnostic. It grabs EMR data. It works in harmony with any electronic medical record. And it has really three ways to influence providers. One, it's point-of-care. Two, it can detect what a provider's wasteful tendencies are. Of course, the provider is the ultimate adjudicator. It detects the context of the patient and the provider's prior behaviors and what's going on with the current patient. And it can nudge, preemptively, a suggestion, sort of a digital, hey, tap on the shoulder, but it doesn't stop or interrupt the physician's workflow."
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