The service transaction between a patient and physician has always been looked at closely from a billing perspective. Relatively few attempts have been made to enhance the match-making aspect of it: like which physician is best suited for the given patient? Tweaking this may have cascading effects downstream in the service experience and actual outcome. Years ago, Zocdoc impressed me with their...
One the joys of working in an opaque system is that there are endless opportunities for curators. "Handpicked", "Invite-only", "Top 0.x%" slogans carry emotional value because the perennially ill-informed consumer is guaranteed to be frustrated with the complexity and impersonal nature of the given opaque system. The national prize for opaque system has been consistently won by healthcare ever...
In the last few years, bar code scanning with smartphones has become much more robust and dependable functionality. Predictably enough, it's main application has been in real-time comparison shopping and product information area, giving rise to new services like RedLaser (recently acquired by eBay). ScanAvert is an interesting paid application of the same functionality. It allows users to scan...
Vitals is a physician search and rating destination. The fact that we need such tools is indisputable, although there are a plethora of sites that claim to have this ability now (DrScore, RateMDs, HealthcareReviews, HealthGrades, DoctorScorecard to name a few) . Which is part of the reason why none of them is successful enough to be the ultimate source of such information. Board certification,...
While we wait for President Obama's public plan, the 46 million uninsured Americans need some options. Healdeal aims to bring the free market model to healthcare as one of them. The goal is to provide a marketplace for self-pay (uninsured) individuals to connect and transact with providers registered on the website. There is scope for such services, for sure. There are significant number of...
While the conventionalists argue otherwise, there is some truth to the fact that plenty of health conditions can be taken care of without actually seeing the patient in-person. Based on that assumption, AmericanWell offers an interactive service that lets patients talk to a physician in real time, anytime. The service went live in January this year and initially focusing on Hawaii. The basic...
I found out about SeniorEducators during a trip to the bay area last year. They are a startup trying to help seniors make the most out of their medicare benefits. Quick Medicare tutorial: It consists of Part A, B, C and D. None pays for all of a covered person's medical costs. The program contains premiums, deductibles and coinsurance, which the covered individual must pay out-of-pocket. After...
Consumer-Driven Healthcare (CDHC) may not have arrived yet, but startups have been sprouting around it for a while. Carol.com is the brainchild of Tony Miller (founder of Definity Health, another CDHC company that he sold to UnitedHealth Group in 2004) and was started in late 2007. Carol.com's original intent was to be a 'marketplace for care'- a place where consumers with fat HSA's could...
Vimo is a consumer portal focused on comparison shopping for healthcare needs. Founded in 2005, Vimo provides a platform for users to research, review, compare and price the following: Hospital Procedures Individual & Group Health Insurance Plans Health Savings Accounts Doctors Compete.com data shows pretty good visitor count (more than 100Kvisitors/month), so they must be doing something...