This is Talk with Audrey. Welcome back. Older adults often shoulder a significant portion of healthcare costs, but may not always receive the care that they prefer. Nicole Iny is Executive Director of Grants and Consumer Education at Fair Health. They've launched Fair health older adults.org with generous support from the John a Hartford Foundation. It's a great website and she's going to talk about that and how patients can have a voice in what happens as their healthcare needs grow. Welcome.
Thank. You. Appreciate you joining me. So this is a really interesting website. Tell us all about Fair Health older adults.org. Yeah, so Fair Health older adults.org offers free tools and resources that older patients and their family caregivers can really use to navigate the healthcare system. So just a few of the tools we offer include shared decision making tools. Those are the ones that combine both clinical and cost information for different conditions that affect older adults.
We offer total treatment cost scenarios that show the cost of care for a year for certain conditions or certain acute events like knee arthroscopy. We also offer a host of different educational content and resources like printable checklists that you could take with you to doctor's appointments and ask questions to get the answers that you need, as well as a list of resources and organizations that really help you navigate the healthcare system.
So we're absolutely thrilled that Fair Health older adults.org, with the generous support of the John a Hartford Foundation is helping older patients and caregivers to use the healthcare system with more confidence. It's so needed, right? Because as we get older, it does for some reason become tad bit more difficult to navigate the system you have built into the site information for family caregivers as well.
How can older adults and family caregivers use the site together in order to navigate the healthcare system and get information? Well, that's a great question. So family caregivers do absolutely play a big role in older patients care and healthcare decisions.
So we made sure on Fair Health older adults.org to offer not only tools in general, but also specific checklists that caregivers themselves could use when taking their older family members or friends to appointments or when making different decisions. So some different examples for how both older patients and family caregivers can use the site really comes down to if there's a new diagnosis or a new condition that they're trying to manage.
If they're trying to research healthcare costs for a condition, they can also look that up on the tools we offer. If they'd really just like to know more about the healthcare system, different topics pertaining to the healthcare system. We offer articles on Medicare and other types of coverage as well as dental coverage in retirement. So it really runs the gamut for how both older patients and caregivers can use the site.
I love the fact also that you have the list of questions that a patient can take to their doctor for that visit, because once you get there, sometimes people feel rushed. They don't remember what it was they wanted to ask, and sometimes they don't know what to ask given their situation. So I think it's really important that you have those lists on board there. So where does Fair Health get its data?
So we get our data from over 70 payers and third party administrators nationwide, and we use our data to provide fair objective information to all healthcare stakeholders, including consumers, such as the tools that you see on Fair Health older adults.org. And how current is the cost information that's available and how the heck you keep up with that? Well, it's fairly current. We update the cost information on our site rather twice a year. So it is fairly current. All right.
What are some of the other obstacles that older adults face when it comes to making those decisions about their healthcare that are sort of some of the things that you might not think of that become obvious after you get. Sick? Yeah, I mean, based on what we've heard from patients as well as caregivers, the main obstacles really tend to be that lack of transparency in healthcare costs and healthcare in general.
So that difficulty in finding cost information and other information related to coverage or care relevant to their situation is hard to come by, as well as the inability to really understand and use that information to make informed healthcare decisions. So fair health older adults do org can really help address some of those challenges. And what are you hearing from patients and caregivers about the experience both on the site and how they've used the site to help them make decisions?
So the feedback has really been overwhelmingly positive. In a survey of older patients and caregivers, we found that 67% were saying that Fair Health older adults that are, I increase their knowledge and understanding of shared decision-making, and another 65% said that the site helped them to better understand how to manage their healthcare costs. So that's really great. Indeed it is. Indeed it is. So guys, the website is fair health older adults.org.
What else do we need to know as seniors as we go into a senior citizen, if you will, and senior season? The most important things that we need to keep in mind as we navigate taking care of ourselves, working with caregivers and navigating the system. Well, it's really all about empowering yourself and asking the right questions and staying informed. And you could do that by visiting Fair Health older adults.org for all the tools and the resources that I just mentioned.
All right, guys, when you go to the site, you're going to be thrilled at the information that you find available there. My guest has been Nicole eni, executive Director of Grants and Consumer Education at Fair Health. The site again is Fair Health older adults.org. Nicole, thank you so very much for joining me. Thanks for having me.