ITHACA, N.Y. -- "Consumer-directed" models of health insurance that give consumers more financial accountability and responsibility for decisions about their health care will be the focus of a conference at Cornell University, April 8-9.

"Consumers are receiving information about price and quality about 'consumer-directed' models of insurance from a wide range of sources, including direct-to-consumer advertising, the Internet, and disease management and wellness programs," says Will White, director of the Sloan Program in Health Administration at Cornell. "We plan to explore to what extent models, such as combining high deductibles with health savings accounts or similar arrangements and catastrophic coverage, are being adopted, how they are working, what the impact of the availability of new types of information has been on consumer behavior and what sorts of interactions may be occurring."

The conference, Consumers, Information and the Evolving Healthcare Market Place, is sponsored by the Sloan Program, Department of Policy Analysis and Management in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. Open to the public with a registration fee, the conference is free to Cornell faculty, staff and students.

The topics to be explored by scholars from around the country who will be making presentations include consumer-directed insurance plans and evolving systems of reimbursement; disease management, wellness programs and the utilization of health-care services; the role of price and quality information on consumer choice of health plans and providers; and direct-to-consumer advertising, marketing to physicians and the demand for health-care services. Speakers include Meredith Rosenthal, Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health at Harvard University, discussing new types of consumer-directed health plans and Leemore S. Dafny, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, speaking on the effects of mandating report cards for Medicare HMOs.

For more information, see http://www.sloan.cornell.edu .