Clearity Health, a Crowdsourced Search Engine for Local Healthcare Prices, Launches in Austin

Clearity promises to establish true accountability in healthcare and give control back to patients with this cost information, all while resolutely ensuring the protection of the privacy of all uploaders.

FREMONT, CA: Clearity Health, a new organization created by successful local founders and medical doctors, has been launched in Austin. Its namesake healthcare cost search engine will show users precisely how much other patients with similar conditions have paid at local hospitals and medical offices, as well as details about what services could be needed. Clearity is asking anyone who has sought treatment at an Austin-area facility to send anonymized copies of their medical bills through their safe website because it is driven by a crowdsourced dataset of real patient experiences. Clearity promises to establish true accountability in healthcare and give control back to patients with this cost information, all while resolutely ensuring the protection of the privacy of all uploaders.

"I had to have my appendix out, and even though I had no complications and left the same day, I was surprised by nearly $70,000 in bills, most of them from the hospital facility itself. Over the course of a year spent fighting those bills, I was shocked to learn about vastly different costs for the same services at different hospitals. If I'd have known what each hospital charged for my procedure, I might have gone to a different facility and saved thousands of dollars and weeks of time and stress.