Today is #EqualPayDay. In honor of pay parity, we’re thinking about how doctors and patients navigate costs from our fly-on-the-wall perspective. Out of the 15,000+ dialogues we’ve collected in the United States over the last year, about 5,700 mention the cost of treatment. We’ve found that health care professionals, patients, and caregivers approach the topic very similarly. Both groups primarily place the burden of deferring costs on insurance companies, referring to the role of insurance providers in approximately 70% of dialogues.

One surprising feature of this discussion is how frank and honest it is. We expect that patients will use more direct language like “money” and “dollars,” which they do in approximately 30% of cost discussions, but we see that physicians also regularly shy away from euphemisms and use the same frank language in about 25% of discussions. Knowing that the cost of care can be a barrier to treatment, HCPs come to these conversations equipped to help patients reduce out-of-pocket costs.

Read more about our recent investigation of some of these cost-saving strategies in our article in Medical Decision Making: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26785714.