Every employer I talk with wants the same thing: confidence.  

Confidence that the care they're paying for is the best and most efficient care possible.  

That's exactly what we explored in the recent Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH) webinar "Are We There Yet? Making Transparency Work for Purchasers and Patients.” The discussion centered on findings from the PBGH Health Care Data Demonstration Project, an initiative designed to combine price transparency data with provider quality data to give self-insured employers a clear, confident picture of value.

Why Provider Quality Matters

Transparency rules have opened access to pricing data, and that’s an important step.  

Employers can use that data to inform purchasing strategies, but price data alone doesn’t answer the most important question: are employees getting high-quality care?

Without a quality lens, it’s impossible to know which providers consistently deliver high-value care, and where unnecessary variation is driving up costs. The transparency data provided by the payers provides a view to unit cost, but does not show the total cost of care picture and whether care provided was efficient.  

Bringing Provider Quality Into Focus

That’s where Embold Health came in. Using our dataset of over 230 million individuals, we measure three domains — appropriateness, effectiveness, and cost — across 21 specialties and 68 subspecialties to provide a provider quality lens at both the practice and individual provider level.  

That means we’re not just measuring if care happened, but whether it was the right care. Our provider quality scores give employers a clearer view of which physicians consistently deliver clinically appropriate, cost-effective treatment and which do not.

By combining these scores with transparency pricing, the project created commercial comparative benchmarks. For the first time, employers had a practical playbook for evaluating true healthcare value and the information they needed for smarter benefit design.

A New Playbook for Confident Action

This project showed what’s possible when cost and quality data are brought together. Employers now have actionable information to identify not only the most cost-effective providers, but also the highest-quality ones. That clarity challenges old assumptions — proving that higher price doesn’t equal higher quality — and gives employers a framework to design benefits with confidence and hold networks accountable.

For me, the biggest takeaway is simple: transparency alone isn’t enough. We must bring data to life in ways that matter for employers, families and patients. The PBGH project proved that’s possible by giving employers the tools to reduce wasteful variation, improve outcomes and finally make purchasing decisions with confidence.

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