I ran across a cool website today called outofpocket.com; let's call it Oop for short.  Oop is a good thing, not to be confused with Oops, a bad thing.  Oop also rhymes with something that occasionally attaches itself to the bottom of my son's shoes, which he feels compelled to bring into the house, but that's a story for another day.

Outofpocket.com is an exclamation point on consumer directed healthcare, not only because its mission is to bring transparency to the cost of medical treatment and procedures, but because it is largely driven by you and me! 

As luck would have it, the nurse from my son's school called today.  Not to tell me he had stepped in anything but that he had a sore throat.  We were advised to come get him before he spread the plague to the rest of the thousand or so students there at his school or worse, infect the nurse. 

While my wife took him to the Doc, I typed "strep throat" into the Oop website and POOF, it gave me pricing for strep throat testing in my area.  The tests ranged from $10.00 to $55.00.  Unfortunately, the locations listed were really not that near my house, so I couldn't hit the $10.00 strep test store.  But I will have an idea of whether the price of the test was good, bad or ugly.

Here's the thing.  As best I can tell, the Oop website is fairly new, and because the database is being built based on real people receiving real procedures. It is not yet extensive to the point that it has my son's Doc down the street. 

That's where the opportunity is knocking for you and me!  If we go and take a little from Oop, we should also give back a little to Oop.  We should input the pricing of our medical treatments and procedures.

Unfortunately for me, at least for the next few weeks, I can't make a deposit at the Oop bank.  Right now I do not know what the cost of the strep test was.  Even though I have a high deductible health plan (HDHP) and am on the hook for 100% of the charge I will not know what it is until my insurance company sends me a bill.  So, when it shows up I will plug the cost into outofpocket.com and join the movement.

If we all give a little bit, soon we will take a fantastic concept and turn it into a powerful and positive machine, for ourselves, our kids our parents and friends.  For sure, check it out!