Help is at hand to publish your fees

 

Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) enforcement action is being beefed up this year, but a consultant engagement team at the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) is here to help you, says Anne Coyne.

Whatever your views on the CMA’s Private Healthcare Invest­igation Order – and we know for many of you they won’t be positive – the fact remains that consultants have a legal obligation to comply with the requirements it sets out.

And the most important of these rules are contained in Article 22: information on consultants’ fees. 

The CMA has indicated it is going to step up its enforcement action in 2024, so simply ignoring the order is not really an option. 

But the good news is that compliance is a relatively easy thing to achieve and that PHIN’s consultant engagement team is here to help you. 

The team has been reaching out to consultants over the past few years and is delighted that nearly 10,000 have now submitted fee information. 

And an even greater number have information of one form or another on their PHIN website profiles. 

Patients tell us how valuable these profiles are to them, especially when they have extra content, such as a photo.

Virtual assistance

If you have yet to engage in the process, the team would welcome the opportunity to talk to you at a virtual session or one-to-one. 

At these, you will be introduced to PHIN and its objectives and meet consultant engagement members, who will walk you through the submission process for your data and answer any questions or concerns you may have. 

The virtual sessions are run twice a week, usually at 8am and once at 6pm, and the team is also able to run lunchtime sessions if they fit in better with your work patterns. 

Our team is grateful to all those consultants who have given their feedback on the data submission process and PHIN is making changes because of this information. 

One key change is that consultants will soon be able to nominate their medical secretary as an approved party to submit data on your behalf. 

We are making the required technical changes to our consultant web portal and are also liaising with the British Society of Medical Secretaries and Administrators (BSMSA) to ensure processes are appropriate and that we can identify any potential blockages or issues to medical secretary involvement. We will offer bespoke training for medical secretaries in due course. 

What’s in it for me? 

In addition to compliance with the order, we want engagement with PHIN to provide benefits for consultants. 

We know that some of you are already using our data in appraisals and revalidations, but want to offer even more. 

For instance, we will soon be able to provide you with all the information we hold about you in one easy to access place. 

What’s next?

This year we will start to publish information about consultants’ fee arrangement with private medical insurers. 

This will cover which companies you work with and whether your fees fall within the insurers’ price range or whether patients will be required to pay an additional fee. 

We are also working towards ‘presumed publication’. Consul­tants will still be able to review and verify the data supplied by hospitals about them for publication, but we will publish data where a consultant has neither verified their data nor raised data issues for review by hospitals.

PHIN, as a whole, is also working on its website this year to make it even more attractive to potential patients – it already gets around 40,000 visitors a month. 

This should be an exciting year and we hope that even more of you will be engaging with us. Together we can deliver the order requirements and help patients make informed healthcare decisions. 

Contact the team:

You can contact the team directly by phone on 020 3823 7518 or by email at consultants@phin.org.uk during office hours (9am-5pm). Outside these hours, please leave a message and we will get back to you. 

Alternatively, you can book a virtual session or a one-to-one using this form:  

Anne Coyne (right) is consultant services manager at the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) 

• See ‘PHIN grows its database of private consultants’