Know Your Rights
PHC4 compiles patient safety and pricing information to empower you to make more informed health decisions.
You Deserve to Know the Cost and Quality of Your Care
We know a lot of factors go into your care decisions. And as a Pennsylvania citizen, there are protections in place to give you more transparency into your treatment. Our reports offer a well-rounded look at health care, taking into account things like patient safety and procedure costs to make sure you have all the information you need to make well-informed choices.
Patient Safety
Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that requires health care facilities to report on patient safety. This includes disclosing all serious events (events that harmed a patient) or incidents (events that could have potentially harmed a patient).
Once this information is reported, other organizations (like PHC4) can review the data and help patients and health care providers make sense of it. Compiling this data makes it easier to spot trends in patient safety across procedures or facilities. The sooner an issue is found, the sooner health care providers can address it and make their practice safer for patients. Patients can also use this data to review the safety of a certain procedure or decide between different providers based on the rate of patient safety events and incidents.
Price Transparency
Beginning January 1, 2021, every hospital in the U.S. is required to provide clear, accessible pricing information about the items and services they provide. This includes the standard charges for services like x-rays, outpatient visits, lab tests, and more. Hospitals also have to be transparent about the rates they negotiate with insurance companies and the discounted prices they’re willing to accept if you pay the hospital directly in cash.
This pricing information needs to be available online and in a format you, as a consumer, can understand. Hospitals that don’t provide this information can face penalties. The goal is to make it easier for you to compare prices across hospitals and get a better sense of how much your care will cost—before you get a bill.
How Does PHC4 Use All This Data?
Pricing and patient safety information give us objective data points that we can use to help you make health care choices. While we know other factors impact your decisions (hospital ratings and reviews, patient wait times, cleanliness, etc.), many are subjective and can be difficult to measure. By focusing on pricing and patient safety, we can collect non-biased data that helps you compare costs and get a better sense of patient outcomes, two critically important details when making care decisions.
To get a first-hand look at how we use this data, you can browse our reports. We often include information like procedure costs and in-hospital mortality rates. You can also view our case studies to see how doctors, researchers, and health care administrators use our reports and data to make real changes in their facilities.
