HealthHack 2016 Brisbane
Team Members:
Kenan Kalayci Lecturer @EconomicsUQ, ARC Decra Fellow, Behavioural Economist
Andrew Saul Data Analyst at Tatts
Randall Austin Retail - Food Trucks - Entrepreneur
Gareth Moores Programmer
Team Name: Golden Dentist
Description of Team Problem: Overcharging in the market of dental procedures
Solution: Open sharing of dental procedure costs using verified receipts.
In this repository: Code Folder which holds the Data Folder in addition to the templates. While holding the init and index python files. In depth the data folder holds the Dentist Database SQL File named dentist_db in addition to the Sample Data ad a CSV File named dummy_data_v1. Going further the files: area_lookup area_lookup_results dentist_lookup dentist_lookup_results index procedure_lookup procedure_lookup_results
These files makeup the website.
In terms of the presentation at Health Hack Brisbane 2016 the files involved are the data viz design folder plus the presentation folder and the research folder. the data viz holds the pathway to building, editing and growing the website from scratch to current version. Where the files are: Screenshots_to_edit folder data viz from Glassdoor
The next key folder in the repository is the presentation folder which includes: Analogy of our solution.txt dental-invoice.xlsx dental-invoice.png Pitch Overview Pitch Structure - Andrew Copy Pitch Structure - Andrew Copy_Kenan Edit Golden Dentist.pptx team wall.jpg Golden-Dental-Team-Photo.jpg
The last folder is the Research folder which makes up of the files: DentalFeeSched Healthcare Costs are bad medicine HealthhackBNE_2016_Kalayci HealthHackPitch ONLINE_DentalCare_FILLER_MindTheGap_graphic_640 Pitch Wrangler Doc problem solution for scan and import researching healthcare pricing in US workingpaper01-14
All these files make up the argument for greater information supply of pricing within dental services and related sectors.
Title: Overpricing in the market for dental services
What is the problem we want to solve?
In privatised health care markets, such as the market for dental care in Australia, doctor-patient relationships are characterised by an information asymmetry and a conflict of interest. The dentist diagnoses the patient’s problem and often also provides the treatment. While both the dentist and the patient has an incentive for the problem to be correctly diagnosed and sufficiently treated, the dentist can make higher profits by providing an unnecessarily complicated treatment to the problem (overtreatment), doing excessive diagnostic tests (over-testing) or charging for an expensive treatment while actually providing a cheap but sufficient treatment (overcharging). Lacking the necessary expertise, patients are unable to recognise when they are over-treated or over-charged. And if the patient is fully insured, she may not even care much as her problem is resolved while the cost is shifted to the insurer.
Why do we want to solve this problem?
The problem obviously negatively affects the patients and the insurance providers due to increases in health costs. However, dentists are also adversely affected as many patients avoid having regular check-ups due to their mistrust of the recommended treatments. Solving this problem will reduce health care costs, increase rewards for honest high quality care providers, and increase efficiency in the healthcare system.
What do you envision as the ideal solution for this problem? If you had unlimited resources
Separating diagnosis from treatment would help solve the problem but is usually prohibitively costly. Making diagnostic tests/information easily accessible by alternative dentists would help but there are technical challenges as well as potential privacy issues.
What sort of Open Source solution do you think can be created in 48 hours, by a small team of developers, designers and data analysts?
Standard reputation/online review systems and competition (second opinions) don’t work in these markets. An anonymous feedback system where patients can report their suspicions about being over-treated/over-charged/over-tested and solicit alternative diagnosis can assist the solution. A rare example of a solution to a similar credence goods market is one by Uber, which uses a combination of GPS (which helps identify overtreatment), standardised pricing and a feedback/reputation mechanism. A similar solution would need to gather information from patients and dentists and give more confidence and power the patients in identifying whether they are overtreated/overcharged.
What are the current solutions for handling this problem?
Emphasis on medical ethics and self-regulation by industry associations and complaints handling by The Office of the Health Ombudsman or National Health Practitioner Ombudsman and Privacy Commissioner can be useful. However, while these services are effective for under-treatment they don’t address overtreatment effectively.
Description of Pitch:
problem:
- lack of price transparency in the market for dental services
- imbalance of information: dentists know their and their competitors prices, patients don’t know anything //?
why is lack of price transparency a problem?
- prevents healthy competition between dentists
- leads to patient dissatisfaction
- discourage patients from taking cheap and efficient preventive check-ups
- According to research, affordability is a major barrier preventing Australians from visiting the dentist.
- over charging is a problem: Dr Micheal Foley
why isn’t this problem solved already? //? unclear
- the problem with doctor reviews - Dr Micheal Foley
- dentists can’t give “quotes” to people (answer: “it depends”)
- the ADA survey isn’t public and only gives average state based prices
what is our solution
- analogy of our solution: it’s Glassdoor for dentist costs
- enables and encourages patients to upload the invoices they have been given by their dentists.
- allows patients to compare dentist prices
why do we use receipts: - patient owned data - verified costs against medicare codes: It’s credible information - people have always shared this info, we’ve just made that a lot easier - actual cost is objective; reviews are subjective
our solution demo
- Use case: I am a new patient. I want to search for dentists and see what general costs are
- Use case: I am a patient with a dentist. I want to see how my dentist bill compares to the market
- demo notes
- photos converted to PDF and information scrapped from PDF are solved problems. The set of documents in this case are very narrow in difference: dentist receipts
why our solution works to solve the problem
- enables and encourages patients to upload the invoices they have been given by their dentists.
- leads to full price transparency
- open pricing won’t punish dentists
- patients are more likely to seek treatment if they know costs
- dentist reputation and quality can be priced
- there is a pressure for dentists to treat efficiently to keep their pricing low
- verified receipts means an audit trail to check: no self reports -evidence from the Netherlands suggest that price transparency
how this scales out
- there are lots of markets where the information is unbalanced which a solution like this can assist to bring balance to pricing by aligning incentives better for both providers and consumers
- other medical markets where pricing information is complex and hard to accurately provide from the service providers
- mechanical repairs, legal services,
team experience //?
- we all learnt a lot more about the dental profession and the problems dentists face: It’s not a simple case of dentists are overcharging; it’s more complex
- this is a team built solution. We started with a team formed on Saturday and together we researched and worked out the solution (show picture of board).
The Above text describes briefly the problem and solution and where it grows from here.
More to come. Stay tuned.
#End Transmission