Option Grid is a shared decision-making (SDM) tool offered by FAIR Health on its free, award-winning consumer website, FAIR Health Consumer. The tool is designed to support meaningful conversations between patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers for 'preference-sensitive' conditions where multiple treatment options exist and the patient's values are crucial to the decision.
FAIR Health's Option Grid tools integrate clinical options from the Option Grid™ patient decision aids (developed by experts at the Dartmouth Institute) with FAIR Health's extensive cost data, which is powered by the nation's largest private healthcare claims database. This pairing of clinical and cost information is a groundbreaking feature, as most traditional decision aids lack cost transparency.
Key Benefits and Capabilities:
- Cost Transparency: Provides cost information alongside clinical options, helping patients plan for their healthcare expenditures and negotiate fees.
- Shared Decision Making: Facilitates SDM, which is known to increase patient engagement, satisfaction, and potentially reduce unnecessary healthcare costs.
- Comparative Options: Allows patients to compare two to three clinical options at once, detailing the trade-offs, risks, and benefits of each.
- Objective Source: Offered by FAIR Health, an independent, national nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing transparency to healthcare costs.
Target Users and Use Cases:
- Target Users: Insured and uninsured consumers (patients and their caregivers) and healthcare providers (clinicians).
- Use Cases: Initially focused on palliative care scenarios (Dialysis, Nutrition Options, Ventilator for seriously ill patients) and later expanded to conditions disproportionately affecting minority populations (Type 2 Diabetes, Uterine Fibroids, Slow-Growing Prostate Cancer). The tools are also available on the provider-oriented platform, fairhealthprovider.org, to help clinicians facilitate SDM discussions.