The next BriefingsDirect healthcare finance insights discussion explores the impacts from increased cost transparency for medical services.

The recent required publishing of hospital charges for medical procedures is but one example of rapid regulatory and market changes. The emergence of more data about costs across the health provider marketplace could be a major step toward educated choices – and ultimately more efficiency and lower total expenditures.

But early-stage cost transparency also runs the risk of out-of-context information that offers little actionable insight into actual consumer costs and obligations. And unfiltered information requirements also place new burdens on physicians, caregivers, and providers – in areas that have more to do with economics than healthcare.

To learn more about the pluses and minuses of increased costs transparency in the healthcare sector, we are joined by our expert panel:

--Heather Kawamoto, Chief Product Officer at Recondo Technology in Denver

--Joann Barnes-Lague, Revenue Cycle Director at Shields Health Care Group in Quincy, Mass.

--Julie Gerdeman, President at HealthPay24 in Mechanicsburg, Penn.

--Beth Jones Sanborn, Managing Editor at Healthcare Finance News/HIMSS Media in Portland, Maine

--Alena Harrison, Senior Director of PBM Innovation at CVS Health in Woonsocket, RI

The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Sponsor: HealthPay24.]