Four insurers may help provide answers to health cost puzzle

Four major health insurers announced plans yesterday to pool their health care claims data into a single database to enable researchers to mine for information about trends in costs, utilization and intensity of care.

Modern Healthcare: Four Insurers To Pool Claims In Research Database
Calling health care spending the "single biggest financial issue facing the nation," a group of four national health insurers announced plans Tuesday to pool more than 5 billion health care claims into a single database that researchers can mine to identify trends in cost, utilization and intensity of care. The Health Care Cost Institute is a not-for-profit research group governed by a six-member board of academic, actuarial and medical professionals who will oversee the database created using data from four insurers: Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare. The database will include government data from Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans, and it may eventually include information from other private insurers (Carlson, 9/20).

CQ HealthBeat: New Answers May Be Coming To Health Cost Puzzle
To what degree do prices, not the volume of health care services, account for rising health costs? To what extent do Medicare cuts cause hospitals and doctors to charge more to private insurers, leading them to increase premiums? Those are two of the questions analysts hope to be able to answer with the launch Tuesday of a first-ever huge research database of private insurance claims. The new Health Care Cost Institute will house data from plans operated by Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and United Healthcare, as well as some Medicare data, including data about Medicare Advantage, the private health plans in Medicare (Reichard, 9/20).

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Insurers Open Up Claims Data
Four of the nation's biggest health insurance companies are opening up their claims data to researchers in hopes that better insight into the massive U.S. health system could improve care and put the brakes on rising costs. Minnetonka-based UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana and Kaiser Permanente said Tuesday they will form a nonprofit group, the Health Care Cost Institute, that for the first time will provide economists, researchers and other experts a look at nationwide medical data for all ages and health issues for people covered by private insurance. The data, which will be stripped of identifying information on patients and medical providers, will include more than 5 billion medical claim records (Crosby, 9/20).

Bloomberg: Health Insurers Pool $1 Trillion In Medical Claims Data To Spot Trends
Major health insurers are pooling more than $1 trillion in claims data and creating an institute to cull the statistics and identify the drivers of higher health spending. More than 5 billion medical claims from Aetna Inc. (AET), Humana Inc. (HUM), Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH) will be collected and combined with government health claims data by the newly formed Health Care Cost Institute. The nonprofit group, which will likely be housed in Washington, will begin publishing semi-annual scorecards beginning next year on spending and consumption of health-care services and products (Weschler, 9/20).

Read related Kaiser Health News Capsules blog post: A Special Kind Of Health Care Fantasy Fulfilled? (Rau, 9/20).