“INBW19: The Power of the Patient’s Choice, With Crane Stavig, Garden Designer, Patient, and Consumer”
by Stacey Richter

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INBW19: The Power of the Patient’s Choice, With Crane Stavig, Garden Designer, Patient, and Consumer
August 30, 2018

In today’s inbetweenisode, we’re going to diverge from our normal panel of health care industry experts and speak instead to the person we all work for, and who we all should be aiming to serve as best we can—the patient. Today we are speaking with Crane Stavig, a garden designer in Seattle, and he is going to tell us about his recent experience finding the best place to have hernia surgery.

Resources to check the cost and quality of the care you are receiving:

Hospital Self-Reported Cost and Volume Info:

 

I’m a creative and detail-oriented professional gardener with many years of hands-on experience in addition to attending ongoing college courses at Edmonds Community College in their highly regarded Horticulture program.

In my previous career, I spent a lot of time working with clients on innovative ways to deliver the results they wanted while keeping an eye on the big picture. Oddly, garden design is quite similar.

I always have to keep a budget and overall objectives in mind while developing strategies and tactics, and managing external resources.

Specialties: Garden design; excel at delivering innovative solutions to garden challenges.

Precision Pruning of specimen trees including Japanese maples and flowering trees. College level and professional training in pruning.

02:30 Why Crane pays out of pocket for his exam.
03:15 The chain of events that Crane, as an average patient, went through to find out the cost for his hernia surgery.
04:20 Why Crane thought to ask for the price of the procedure in the first place.
05:15 What Crane did next when he found out how much the cost of the procedure was going to be.
06:40 David Contorno’s price shopping video – check out his episode, EP186.
09:10 Online services patients can go to get a sense of cash prices for certain procedures.
09:45 Why discovering price breakdowns for patients with insurance is so difficult.
13:50 “Generally speaking, the lower the cost, the higher the quality.”
15:50 What Crane found out from his research on guroo.com.
16:20 Gary Frazier of Om Healthcare, EP168.
18:15 The inconsistency with negotiated insurance prices.
20:20 “Most care provided in this country is not acute.”
21:10 Resources to check the cost and quality of the care you are receiving:
Cost:  New York Times Hospital Pricing Calculator, ClearHealthCosts, Healthcarebluebook.com.
Quality: healthgrades.com, leapfroggroup.org, medicare.gov/hospitalcompare.
25:50 “Give me more information that I can make a decision on.”