Web Analysis - Research on Members' Health Plan Website Use and Impact on Health Care Utilization
- Presenter:
Chair: Randall Ellis; Discussant: Jenny Kenney Tue June 6, 2006 13:45-15:15 Room 235
Rationale: A primary premise of consumer driven healthcare is that members will use reliable resources of information for healthcare decision making. Benefit, network and pricing information is specific to health plans and members must therefore rely upon their plan for this information. The health plan web site is a convenient way to make this information available to members. This study examines the prevalence of plan website use, what information members access, and the impact on health care utilization.
Objectives: To evaluate consumers’ pattern of use of a leading consumer-driven health plan member website, and to examine the relationship between web use and health outcomes and health care utilization behaviors.
Methodology: Our study population is all members enrolled in a leading consumer-driven health plan during the plan years of 2003 or 2004, which includes approximately 185,000 members from 70 employers. Using 2003 and 2004 clickstream data, we examined web site use overall and by the area accessed: “My Account”, “My Benefits”, “Doctors & Hospitals”, “Pharmacy”, “Healthcare Costs” and “Health Resources”. Family is used as the analysis unit since members of the same family will log onto website with subscriber’s identification. We categorized families into groups by number of times they logged on and compared these groups’ illness burden, their utilization behavior including office visits, ER visits, hospital admissions, and drug use. We also examined differences in when the Health Reimbursement Account was exhausted and the deductible was met. In addition, families were categorized by their aggregated illness burden into four groups and their web usage and healthcare utilization were examined by these different risk groups. Linear regression model was used to determine the effect of using any area on website on total healthcare cost, adjusted by their illness burden.
Results: More than half of members accessed the health plan website. In general, members who used web more have higher utilization of health care services. However, for members with high burden of illness, web-users have lower emergency room visits and hospital admissions than non-web-users, and their overall cost were not statistically significantly different from non-web-users. The frequency of access to some areas is strongly related to members’ healthcare cost after adjusting for their illness burden: cost increases with more access to “Doctors & Hospitals” information while decreases with use of “Healthcare Costs”.
Conclusions: Members are active in managing their healthcare utilization by accessing their health pan website. Members with higher utilization are more likely to use the health plan web site. When controlling for illness burden strata, in high health risk group the web-users’ costs were similar to non web-users’ with a reduction in use of acute health care services. This study suggests that there is a relationship between seeing health care costs and actual healthcare spending. Although a direct cause-effect relationship has not yet been established, we believe our findings provide a positive feedback on the benefit of using web-based consumer health information on cost savings.
