The Alliance, in conjunction with Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC) and Business Health Care Group (BHCG), hosted RAND Corporation’s Chris Whaley to talk about the methodology of The RAND Hospital Price Transparency Project, an ongoing initiative to measure and publicly report the prices paid for hospital care. The project is being driven by self-funded employers from across the country with leadership from the RAND Corporation as the analytic partner. Whaley discussed why it’s important to participate, and how more participation will strengthen the results and the overall value to employers.
Whaley was joined by Chris Reader, Senior Director of Workforce & Employment Policy at WMC who talked about how rising health costs and transparency are affecting Wisconsin employers, and Jeff Kluever, Executive Director of BHCG, who talked about the importance of self-funded employers becoming engaged in data reporting efforts such as the RAND project and reporting data to WHIO (Wisconsin Health Information Organization).
WMC, BHCG, and The Alliance are working together to ensure Wisconsin is well-represented in the RAND Study.
Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation
Christopher Whaley is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research focuses on using large-scale medical claims data to examine how information and financial incentives influence patient’s choice of providers, how providers respond to changes in consumer incentives, and how employers and insurers can design insurance benefits to promote value.
His research has been published in a variety of clinical, health policy, and economics journals. He is the lead author of a JAMA paper that examines the effects of online price transparency information. This paper was a finalist for the 2015 National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation Annual Health Care Research Award. He also received the 2015 AHRQ Research Conference Director’s Award for a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine that examines the effect of reference pricing on consumer choice of providers for cancer screening services.
Christopher received a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in health economics from the University of California, Berkeley.