Vanderbilt Releases Cost Estimator To Address Surprise Medical Bills

Nashville’s largest hospital says it’s tired of so many patients being surprised by their bills.

So Vanderbilt University Medical Center has built an online calculator that should show anyone how much they’ll owe out of pocket, at least on the most common procedures, tests and lab work.

Almost any medical bill can feel like a surprise, a phenomenon well-documented by the Kaiser Health News “Bill of the Month” series. But there’s no reason the out-of-pocket cost should be a shock, says Vanderbilt’s vice president of revenue, Heather Dunn.

“We want patients to know how much it will cost them,” she says.

The information is already available if patients are willing to call all the right people. But physicians have resisted having conversations about cost.

“In health care, I think we’ve always wanted patients to know what their financial responsibility was going to be, but to not have that cloud clinical judgment either,” Dunn says. “I’ve seen in the last 10 years or so a coming-together of those two ideas.”

Dunn says there’s growing consensus that the money matters, especially as patients have ever-higher deductibles that require them to pay a larger share of their bills.

Vanderbilt built its own online tool to go a few steps beyond the impending government mandates for price transparency. The cost estimator also considers how much a patient still owes toward their deductible.

Several academic medical centers, including Mayo Clinic and the Gundersen Health System in Wisconsin, have launched similar applications.

Other hospital systems, like Tristar HCA, have online calculators, but they exclude many of the fees charged by independent physicians or imaging groups. Academic medical centers tend to employ their own doctors and have in-house imaging and labs.

Vanderbilt says its cost estimator is usually accurate within 5% of the final bill.