UnitedHealthcare experience illustrates how payers can enable patient engagement.

Patient engagement is crucial to better outcomes and a high-performing health system, but efforts to support it often focus narrowly on the role of physicians and other care providers. Such efforts miss payers' unique capabilities to help patients achieve better health. Using the experience of UnitedHealthcare, a large national payer, this article demonstrates how health plans can analyze and present information to both patients and providers to help close gaps in care; share detailed quality and cost information to inform patients' choice of providers; and offer treatment decision support and value-based benefit designs to help guide choices of diagnostic tests and therapies.

Wide variation in episode costs within a commercially insured population highlights potential to improve the efficiency of care.

Reforming payment methods to move away from fee-for-service reimbursement is widely seen as a crucial step toward controlling health care costs. Although there is a good deal of evidence about variability in costs under Medicare, little has been published about the variability of costs for care that is financed by private insurance. We examined both quality and actual medical costs for episodes of care provided by nearly 250,000 US physicians serving commercially insured patients nationwide.