Beginning in 2022, the Alliance began analyzing the total cost of care delivered across Washington state. Along with the Community Checkup, the Alliance has been able to offer an in-depth view into quality and cost of care in our state. Review the 2023 findings.

With an eye toward equity, the Alliance incorporated the Neighborhood Atlas, a tool validated by the University of Wisconsin, to show how where someone lives can impact the cost of care they receive in Washington. Read more on our Community Checkup website.

Highlights from 2023:

Understanding the cost of health care is an important metric to gauge the value a patient receives. This becomes even more important when we look at some of the socioeconomic barriers to care that impact access including an individual’s ability to afford appropriate, quality care.

However, the total cost of services has long been unreported. The Alliance in 2023 is publishing the average cost by medical group and clinic, county and ACH. The costs are broken into five major categories and 65 service lines.1

The high cost of health care is a burden on U.S. families, with 47% of families finding it difficult to afford their health care costs2. Identifying costs and trends is a powerful management tool for purchasers and health plans to identify opportunities to contract differently, create centers of excellence, steer members to more affordable options, leverage reference-based pricing models, adjust plan designs, etc. Providers in value-based arrangements may identify different referral options at a lower cost for the same service or voluntarily lower their pricing to gain market share.

Through this understanding of how money is being spent, efforts can be made to strategically break longstanding cost trends. Failure to do so will result in delays in access to care, decreased the ability to close clinical gaps in care and ultimately result in higher cost care that could have been avoided.