A new website may help patients determine the cost of their next medical procedure. The non-profit Health Care Cost Institute recently launched guroo.com, an online price transparency tool that uses cost information from some of the country’s biggest insurers.
The website provides national, state and local cost information for treating common health conditions and for other services.
Institute Executive Director David Newman says the biggest difference between Guroo and other price transparency tools is the amount of information on which the estimates are based.
"When you think about what consumers want in terms of transparency, they want to know the likely cost of a service given their diagnosis, where they are and what their plan design is," Newman said. "In order to estimate this accurately, you need a lot of information.”
Currently, people can search 70 different conditions and procedures on the website.