In an effort to provide timely, reliable consumer cost and quality information to inform service and care purchases in the health care marketplace, Florida law requires payers, providers, and health care organizations to calculate prices based on a single standard derived from agreed upon service bundles.

To operationalize Florida’s legislation, NORC partnered with HCCI (Health Care Cost Institute) to build a state all payer claims database (APCD) and create an online health care transparency tool.  As a result, these initiatives enabled the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) to perform data-driven analysis on the population’s health and health care; and empowered consumers with the ability to find and compare the price of common health care services across the state via AHCA’s consumer website, Florida Health Price Finder.

The NORC-HCCI team is responsible for hosting, managing, and analyzing claims covering service years 2015-2021, from multiple commercial health insurance companies, Medicare Advantage, and Medicare. The data is helping consumers make informed decisions by providing more accurate pricing information on the actual cost of procedures, rather than what a facility charges prior to any negotiated discount.

NORC supports HCCI in performing project management, reporting and quality assurance, and inputs to public-facing portal development.  The Florida APCD is hosted in the NORC Data Enclave®, the industry-defining high-performance computational, storage, and analytical environment for secure research of sensitive and confidential data.  NORC ensures regulatory compliance with FISMA, and HIPAA standards and is responsible for security of the data and protecting patient privacy.

NORC provides managed and professional services for the core engineering and maintenance of the Florida APCD warehouse infrastructure, data dissemination development, tiered access to the data, user support and technical assistance, and statistical disclosure control.  We have provided data analytic support, e.g., helping HCCI develop custom data extracts, Limited Datasets, and other data products for authorized data requestors.

FHPF provides national, state, county, and facility price information for a set of common health conditions and services.  The goal of the FHPF is to produce consumer-facing prices for a set of common medical services.  When combined with information from AHCA’s existing health care information website, Floridians are enabled to make comparisons across health care providers based on both price and quality to better inform decisions when seeking health care services.  This outcome aligns with goals of the 2019 Patient Savings Act. In the few months since the program launched, there have been over 130,000 searches on the quality and pricing tool, which are already resulting in savings to the state and its employees.