It is estimated that 57 million working-age Americans — 18-64 years old-live with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, asthma or depression. According to a new study by the Center for Studying Health System Change, more than one in five, or 12.3 million people with chronic conditions, lived in families with problems paying medical bills. With such a high number of people not being able to afford medical insurance, it would be nice to have application that lets people track and compare what they are paying for their doctor visits so that they can collectively track down the most cost effective care providers. Nashville, TN based MedBillManager is building up nicely to provide such a collaboration platform. Actually MedBillManager does more than just bill comparison. It lets you compare your HSA, insurance rates, and manage/track all your medical expenses online.
Inside MedBillManager you regularly keep adding your care providers, bills you need to pay, amounts you have paid, and your insurance contributions. The fact I like about MedBillManager is that it is designed with families in mind and provides a completely anonymous way to enter your medical information. All you need to add a new person to your account it to enter a name and zip code, which makes future comparisons easier. Even when your bills are show to others for comparison, MedBillManager blanks out the last 2 digits of your zip code to make the guessing game more difficult. With all the hard word done by you, MedBillManager can generate reports for all your medical expenses, which can pretty useful during your tax season. The level of detail and classification in each of the forms shows that MedBillManager developers are from medical background and not just couple of web-developers cooking up another web app. All this combined with some great AJAX effects makes it a must use application.
As part of future plans MedBillManager will enable discussion and commenting around your medical bills to provide a true community advantage. Although it is a tough ask from a unfunded startup, but if MedBillManager can build a platform to in conjunction with pharmacies and larger medical aid providers to automatically import your billing information, it will give an big advantage over any upstarts looking to join the race.
Before you go out and start stress testing of the app, I would mention that MedBillManager is currently in beta and looking to officially launch within the next couple of months.
Update: Just as I finished publishing this post I received an email from Christopher Parks at MedBillManager informing me that they have just signed a deal with HSA for America to provide them with a co-branded “powered by MedBillManager” medical bill management tool for their HSA (health savings account) members. Great work and good luck with your first partnership Chris!
Links:
MedBillManager
February 5, 2007 at 5:14 pm |
[...] Other upcoming heath care social network I have covered include Sermo and MedBillManager. [...]
February 26, 2007 at 3:08 pm |
[...] With this deal Microsoft joins the group of software development companies looking to solve issues related to easier access, search, and management of medical information. Besides Microsoft and Google, Intuit recently came out with a new health expense manager software. Previously I had also written about MedBillManager building a web-based expense tracking and collaboration platform. Sermo and PatientsLikeMe are couple of other funded startups building social networks for health care providers and patients respectively. Also last month, former CEO of AOL had launched RevolutionHealth.com, a consumer facing health site. [...]
April 4, 2007 at 10:50 pm |
[...] CarePilot is currently staying away from direct advertising on the site while trying to build sponsored healthcare listings. Since CarePilot has just launched, there is hardly any user-generated content available – typical catch22 situation for any new social-vertical. Would revisit the site in another few months. MedBillManager, Medstory, Sermo, PatientsLikeMe, and RevolutionHealth.com are some of the other recent innovators in the medical space. [...]
May 29, 2007 at 2:13 pm |
[...] Despite all the countless search sessions at Google and elsewhere everyday, one search for which I still depend on my contacts and people I know is – Search for a Doctor. I don’t think I have ever used online search in this case except maybe for searching for an optometrist. Why? Can’t really pinpoint the reason, but more then likely, no one recommended online search for going about searching for a doctor. But, FindYourDoc.com from MedBillManager wants to change my search mechanism. Launched over the last weekend, FindYourDoc offers a simple search interface from where you can search for a doctor among the 697,931 doctor listings or for a hospital from the 6,695 hospital listings. You can search via name, place, specialty, or any combination of the three. Any search session brings up list of doctors and hospitals with their address, phone number, and primary specialty. [...]