Medical Costs Finder
Co-designing a digital solution for medical cost transparency across Australia

Navigating the health system, researching specialists' costs and understanding private health insurance options can be a daunting and confusing experience for patients. 

Recent trends across Australia have pointed to fewer under 30’s signing up for private health insurance due to a perceived lack of value. For those people who do have insurance, the lack of transparency around specialist’s fees and costs means even those with coverage can experience ‘bill shock’. 

Folk was engaged by the Department of Health to uncover user needs and expectations and co-design a phased solution to delivering a digital medical cost transparency tool for patients across Australia. 

Designing for everyone 

The team at Folk focused on bringing a human-centred lens to the development of this important digital product through research co-design and rapid prototyping. Our insights both validated and challenged some of the early assumptions. 

Accessibility and inclusive design are important factors for any government digital presence, particularly one with such a broad audience. With that in mind, a progressive search was developed allowing users to easily navigate through the options. Key to the success of the tool was communicating the detailed medical costs in a simple and engaging way, and to do this we prototyped a number of approaches using different language and visual representations of data. 

The design of the all-important ‘results’ page went through multiple versions before launch and the Medical Cost Finder continues to evolve. With each iteration more comprehensive data is added providing greater value to patients as they navigate the health care system. 

Launching the MVP 

Phase one of the Medical Costs Finder is live on the Department of Health website complete with medical costs for common services in and out of hospital that patients want to know more about. Since the launch of the Medical Costs Finder the Folk team has continued to work with the Department of Health to research, prototype and test the next update. 

Want to know more? 

If you would like to know more about the Medical Costs Finder, visit the Department of Health website.