Costs of Care, a nonprofit organization founded by a recent grad, recently launched a national essay contest on the cost of healthcare. Two $1000 prizes will be awarded for anecdotes that best illustrate the importance of cost-awareness in medicine.
Neel Shah '04 MD'09, who founded Costs of Care in 2009, said he realized that "even the best doctors have little idea of how their decisions impact what the patients pay." The principal vision of the organization is to reduce medical bills by using information technology and social media to encourage doctors to keep costs in mind.
The group is creating smart phone applications to help doctors and patients "understand healthcare's costs," said Ariana Green '04, the nonprofit's director of public affairs, who first met Shah when they were writing fellows at Brown. After Brown, Shah became a doctor, and Green wrote articles about healthcare as a Fulbright scholar, she wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
"We need people from various disciplines working on these issues together," Green wrote.
The essay contest was conceived as a "first step in characterizing this issue," said Shah, who said he believes that "one good story is worth a thousand academic papers." The primary goal of the essay contest is to shed light on stories of people who are made "financially sick" by "unexpected and outrageous healthcare costs," Green said.
In the spring, Costs of Care will bring together a group of leaders from different disciplines to discuss the finalists' stories and launch a dialogue on creative ways to fix the healthcare system.
In just two weeks, Costs of Care has received submissions from all over the country. The organization is accepting submissions until Nov. 1. Essays will be judged by leaders from different disciplines, including Michael Leavitt, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Jeffrey Flier, the dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard, and surgeon and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande.
Six finalists — three medical professionals and three non-professionals — will be announced Nov. 15, and the $1000 prize winners will be announced Dec. 15.
