PHIN offers to help doctors show fees
Reports by Robin Stride
The Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) is reprioritising its work to ensure it does all it can to help the independent sector comply with requirements of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Compliance with the CMA Order compelling fee transparency has not progressed as far or as fast as many would like due to the ‘complexities involved’, according to its new medical doctor boss.
But chief executive Dr Ian Gargan said the organisation was now in a strong position to work together and accelerate the process.
He told the conference that rapid progress was being made, with volumes doubling since May 2021.
The latest figures (September 2022) showed nearly 31,000 patients were visiting the website every month, with 7,000 of them contacting a consultant or hospital directly from the site.
PHIN was also doing more work on its website to help doctors and would continue to train them and hospitals on how to supply information. It aimed to collaborate with hospitals and providers.
This would only be achieved by hospitals, consultants, and private medical insurers working together across the sector.
Dr Gargan believes the co-operation can make things better for patients by being more transparent and allowing them to make better choices – something patients are asking PHIN to help them with.
He recognised that complying with the CMA Order was sometimes difficult due to patients being a priority, but said PHIN was there to help, offering a range of support through its portal including:
Guides and videos for each process;
Opportunities to attend a virtual session to review each process – which are held bi-weekly;
One-to-one support where that is easier for the consultant.
Dr Ian Gargan
Dr Gargan said PHIN was listening to consultants, hospitals and other partners to see how it could help make the process easier and increase compliance even further.
It was working with insurers to involve them in understanding and accessing the measures and how these could be made useful for patients.
Orthopaedic surgeon Susan Alexander said PHIN did not figure high on Google searches and people did not look beyond the second page when searching online.
Doctors were not opposed to information being gathered but it needed to be the right type.
As a patient, she would want to know whether the doctor was going to listen to her and treat her as an individual.
She said she would want someone who made their choices based on what she needed rather than how much they would be remunerated and whether the payment was higher from doing one procedure over another – ‘and that is the danger of what people in this room are doing to the private healthcare market’.