N.H. insurance website allows comparisons of hospitals, lacks info on clinics

Concord — A New Hampshire website comparing cost and quality at the state’s health care facilities has made it easier to do the comparison — as long as you’re comparing hospitals rather than urgent care centers or walk-in facilities.

Those non-hospital facilities have become increasingly popular in recent years and perform an growing percentage of health care procedures, but at the long-running website NHHealthCost.org, you can only compare their costs, not their quality.

The website, run by the New Hampshire Insurance Department for a decade, can compare costs because the department does the calculations itself. It uses actual insurance claims to figure average cost per facility for about 100 medical procedures ranging from simple to complex, as well as a dozen dental procedures.

That information is calculated for the state’s 26 hospitals and many stand alone clinics.

That’s how the website can show, for example, that depending on your insurance provider an ankle X-ray can cost between $700 and $1,400 depending on where you go, whether to a hospital or a clinic, while a gall bladder surgery costs between $7,000 and $15,000.

But the website also provides information about quality, which many people care about at least as much as cost. That’s where clinics aren’t included.

“I thought it was just me when I was looking to find the data and I couldn’t find it,” said Maureen Mustard, director of health care analytics for the state Insurance Department. “We hired a vendor and they did extensive research — we only show publicly available quality data, we’re not in the business of telling people what quality is — and they couldn’t find it.”

NHHealthCost.org includes data on patient experiences from surveys, as well as data about how quickly care is applied. That information is publicly available from hospitals, which must report it to be eligible for Medicare funding, but it’s not available for clinics — at least not in New Hampshire.

Some quality measurements are publicly available for urgent-care and walk-in clinics in other states, Mustard said.

While the website has shown both cost and quality metrics for hospitals for years, an upgrade to the site announced on Monday allows them to be compared all at one time.

The department said the website gets about 40,000 visitors a year.