Audits to ‘challenge doctors’ on price

By Gary Culliton. A National Price Information Office is to “price hospital procedures and bundled treatments”, the Minister for Health has pledged. This will relate to public and private prices for medical treatments, according to Dr James Reilly, who said he believed that medical costs were currently out of control. He indicated that insurers would be made to conduct clinical audits “to challenge the doctors”, and stressed that he did not want to incentivise public hospitals to take private patients. He promised there would be a “threshold that will be put in place in each hospital, beyond which private patient…