April conference to focus on 'consumer-directed' health insurance

By Susan S. Lang

"Consumer-directed" models of health insurance and ways in which they may interact with new sources of information for consumers will be the focus of a conference at Cornell, April 8-9.

"There has been a rapid growth in interest in 'consumer-directed' health plans that give consumers increased financial accountability and responsibility for their decisions about health care. At the same time, consumers are receiving growing amounts of information about price and quality, not only from their health plans, but from direct-to-consumer advertising, the Internet, public agencies and disease management and wellness programs," said Will White, director of the Sloan Program in Health Administration at Cornell. "Key questions we will explore include the extent to which consumer-directed models of reimbursement are really being adopted, how they are working, what the impact of the availability of new types of information has been on consumer behavior and what sorts of interactions are taking place." The conference, "Consumers, Information and the Evolving Healthcare Marketplace," is sponsored by the Sloan Program in Health Administration and the Department of Policy Analysis and Management in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. Open to the public with a registration fee, the conference is free to Cornell faculty members and students.

Conference speakers include leading scholars from around the country, who will be making presentations on topics that include consumer-directed insurance plans and evolving systems of reimbursement; disease management, wellness programs and the utilization of health-care services; the role of price/quality information on consumer choice of health plans and providers; and direct-to-consumer advertising. Speakers include Meredith Rosenthal, Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health at Harvard University, discussing new types of consumer-directed health plans, and Leemore S. Dafny, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, speaking on the effects of mandating report cards for Medicare HMOs.

For more information, see http://www.sloan.cornell.edu.