As more companies offer high-deductible health plans to their workers, a leading proponent of the trend says that employers also must help patients become smarter shoppers for care.

Companies that successfully deliver both halves of the equation -- offering the insurance policies and providing good information about the cost and quality of medical services -- will help bring true "consumerism" to health care, said Ann Mond Johnson, president of Chicago-based Subimo LLC, during an address yesterday morning to the annual health care symposium sponsored by the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health.

"You don't do it just because of the dollars," said Ms. Johnson during a speech to more than 300 people registered for the Downtown meeting at the Marriott City Center. "You do it because it's the right thing."

Ms. Johnson's company, of course, makes a business out of trying to give such information to consumers. In April, Highmark Inc., the region's largest health insurer, announced that its member Web site would begin displaying information about hospital quality as compiled by Subimo.

The Chicago company pulls information from publicly-available reports, such as those published by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. It also provides information on how often different hospitals perform a given procedure, which can be an indicator of quality.

A slide that Ms. Johnson displayed yesterday, for example, showed that the Cleveland Clinic performed more than five times as many heart valve replacement and repair surgeries as Allegheny General Hospital and West Penn Hospital. While acknowledging that it is difficult to provide comprehensive quality information about many types of medical care -- there are more than 160 variables that affect the quality of any given heart valve replacement surgery, she estimated -- Ms. Johnson predicted a day will come when consumers book their surgeries much as they do airline flights on Orbitz.com.

"As you put this information out there, you will see consumers starting to shop," she said.

The move to consumerism in health care is happening as social values are changing about personal responsibility for health risks, Ms. Johnson said. The share of people who think it's OK for employers to publicly declare they won't hire smokers, for example, is growing, she said, adding that similar opposition could be building against obesity.

High deductible health plans often are defined as plans that carry deductibles of more than $1,000 for individuals and $2,000 for families. If certain federal requirements are met, high deductible insurance policies can be paired with Health Savings Accounts, which allow for consumers to buy medical services with pre-tax dollars.

The share of companies offering high-deductible health plans has steadily increased in recent years, with 33 percent of employers surveyed this year by the National Business Group on Health saying they plan on offering some version of the insurance product in 2007. But Kim Bellard, a vice president with Highmark, said the adoption of high deductible plans in the local market has been slower. A local survey this year by Cowden Associates, a Downtown benefits and actuarial firm, suggested that about 11 percent of companies here offered high deductible health plans between July 2005 and April 2006.