"Specifically, the company is adding two new features to its product line-up today: iPhone patient payment processing, which allows doctors and staff to process payments using the Square card reader attached to an iPhone or iPod Touch..."
Isn't the whole insurance problem that I'm not the one making the payments, my insurance company is?
Correct. Square is used to pay copays or balances that may remain after insurance payments have been processed (deductibles, denials, etc.).
The main interface allows for the doctor to press one button to easily pay a known copay, or press another button to pay an arbitrary amount. In the screenshot here [1], the patient could pay his $490 balance by pressing the "Payment" button, or the $20 copay by pressing the "Copay" button.
If you're looking for a truly disruptive startup, you should tackle insurance billing. This is a $1 Trillion+ industry powered by people making phone calls and sending paper mail.
Just look at this list of insurance payers: https://drchrono.com/public_payer_search/. See how they all have different enrollment forms? Every clinic that wants to do electronic billing with insurance has to fill out an enrollment form for every insurer on that list (though most only do a subset). Filling out those forms is powered by people.
For those of you that haven't dealt with insurance, a real-time eligibility checker is actually a huge deal. The best of class eligibility providers define "real-time" as "we'll respond within five minutes to your request, and only between the hours of 8am and 6pm Eastern, and often the service will be down for many of those hours, and requests will fail randomly, and we can handle a full 10 requests per minute." When clinics get eligibility information wrong they end up eating the cost of service or sending out a huge unexpected bill to the patient.
(Actually, it looks like DrChrono is using Emdeon, which has many of the problems described above.)
The (stealthy) biotech startup at which I work has to deal with a huge number of insurance companies. I've been working on insurance claim integration and had to build out a parser for the absurd file format standard the healthcare industry uses (https://github.com/sbuss/TigerShark). We're parsing and handling claim acceptance/denials pretty well (resulting in, literally, a 300x boost in productivity of our billing & support team).
I just finished building out a 271 interface for medicare and emdeon - the error rate is higher than I'd like, but isn't terrible. Response rates are typically under 20 seconds for us...
For claims, we're using http://x12parser.codeplex.com/. It's still pretty cumbersome, but I think that's more a symptom of the format itself.
I've been working on our billing features and have worked with our X12 parser quite a bit. I died a little inside when I realized that I could scan X12 files almost as quickly as reading English. :P
This is absolutely true. The opportunity to disrupt insurance is massive, and at this point, almost a certainty.
Through Leaky, one of the things that we've always liked is that there's room for disruption in all parts of the spectrum. Customer acquisition, retention, quoting, pricing, binding, billing, etc ad nauseum. You can even decide if you want it to be B2C or B2B.
For us, we've focused on 1) simplifying the comparing and ultimately the purchasing of personal lines insurance (auto, home, life) and 2) creating a real-time (truly real-time; not the "we'll call you back in 5 minutes" model) commercial insurance comparison and purchasing platform.
There are a lot of headaches to disrupting insurance as an industry, namely there are a lot of regulations and a lot of litigious parties. However, our view is that mounting public frustration (for all forms of insurance) and the current lack of software-based solutions make insurance a ripe industry for disruption.
I don't see the "major upgrade" here. As a doc you can already use Square to process payments, and you can look up "real time insurance information" easily already via the web.
Breathless pronouncements from a supposed technical company that physicians will use their app because it "makes them feel modern" are a trifle annoying. Docs will consider using an app like this when (if ever) it is demonstrated that input/dictation of specialized vocabulary is robust on pads, and when (if ever) there is something at all good to say about trusting a commercial third party to store a practice's protected health information remotely, eg when (if ever) questions about security, access levels and logging, deletion, and backup policies of remote data storage of protected health info are fully addressed.
From the title i assumed they would see insurance data, client would pay drchrono which the real insurance copay is, drchrono would pay dr and handle the bogus "fake insurance prices becoming real prices in a few months" crazies.
But agreed. If it's just a cheesy app,flagged. Obviously spam.
> As a doc you can already use Square to process payments
Yes, but the application is integrated with the Square app to make it more efficient. Payments made via square also automatically sync with our billing/accounting section of our application, which saves the doctor/biller a lot of time. If the doctor is solely using square to take patient payments, then the accounting is basically automated through our system.
> you can look up "real time insurance information" easily already via the web.
Most doctors call the insurance company directly to verify eligibility. Checking via the iPad (which is already used to onboard the patient) saves the doctor or front office some time.
> Breathless pronouncements from a supposed technical company that physicians will use their app because it "makes them feel modern" are a trifle annoying
Doctors want to feel modern. It helps bring in patients. How do you feel when you go to a doctor still using paper, and wait 5 minutes for them to shuffle through file folders to find your chart?
The state of Healthcare Informatics in virtually all its manifestations is outrageous. Do I think Dr Chrono is "the" solution? No. Does it help move the ball forward? Yes. And for that, I applaud them.
12 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 40.3 ms ] threadIsn't the whole insurance problem that I'm not the one making the payments, my insurance company is?
I guess this would be for co-pays, or the balance owed for what isn't covered by the insurance company.
The main interface allows for the doctor to press one button to easily pay a known copay, or press another button to pay an arbitrary amount. In the screenshot here [1], the patient could pay his $490 balance by pressing the "Payment" button, or the $20 copay by pressing the "Copay" button.
[1] http://d.pr/i/Ulh5
edit: added a bit more detail
Just look at this list of insurance payers: https://drchrono.com/public_payer_search/. See how they all have different enrollment forms? Every clinic that wants to do electronic billing with insurance has to fill out an enrollment form for every insurer on that list (though most only do a subset). Filling out those forms is powered by people.
For those of you that haven't dealt with insurance, a real-time eligibility checker is actually a huge deal. The best of class eligibility providers define "real-time" as "we'll respond within five minutes to your request, and only between the hours of 8am and 6pm Eastern, and often the service will be down for many of those hours, and requests will fail randomly, and we can handle a full 10 requests per minute." When clinics get eligibility information wrong they end up eating the cost of service or sending out a huge unexpected bill to the patient.
(Actually, it looks like DrChrono is using Emdeon, which has many of the problems described above.)
The (stealthy) biotech startup at which I work has to deal with a huge number of insurance companies. I've been working on insurance claim integration and had to build out a parser for the absurd file format standard the healthcare industry uses (https://github.com/sbuss/TigerShark). We're parsing and handling claim acceptance/denials pretty well (resulting in, literally, a 300x boost in productivity of our billing & support team).
For claims, we're using http://x12parser.codeplex.com/. It's still pretty cumbersome, but I think that's more a symptom of the format itself.
Through Leaky, one of the things that we've always liked is that there's room for disruption in all parts of the spectrum. Customer acquisition, retention, quoting, pricing, binding, billing, etc ad nauseum. You can even decide if you want it to be B2C or B2B.
For us, we've focused on 1) simplifying the comparing and ultimately the purchasing of personal lines insurance (auto, home, life) and 2) creating a real-time (truly real-time; not the "we'll call you back in 5 minutes" model) commercial insurance comparison and purchasing platform.
There are a lot of headaches to disrupting insurance as an industry, namely there are a lot of regulations and a lot of litigious parties. However, our view is that mounting public frustration (for all forms of insurance) and the current lack of software-based solutions make insurance a ripe industry for disruption.
Breathless pronouncements from a supposed technical company that physicians will use their app because it "makes them feel modern" are a trifle annoying. Docs will consider using an app like this when (if ever) it is demonstrated that input/dictation of specialized vocabulary is robust on pads, and when (if ever) there is something at all good to say about trusting a commercial third party to store a practice's protected health information remotely, eg when (if ever) questions about security, access levels and logging, deletion, and backup policies of remote data storage of protected health info are fully addressed.
But agreed. If it's just a cheesy app,flagged. Obviously spam.
Yes, but the application is integrated with the Square app to make it more efficient. Payments made via square also automatically sync with our billing/accounting section of our application, which saves the doctor/biller a lot of time. If the doctor is solely using square to take patient payments, then the accounting is basically automated through our system.
> you can look up "real time insurance information" easily already via the web.
Most doctors call the insurance company directly to verify eligibility. Checking via the iPad (which is already used to onboard the patient) saves the doctor or front office some time.
> Breathless pronouncements from a supposed technical company that physicians will use their app because it "makes them feel modern" are a trifle annoying
Doctors want to feel modern. It helps bring in patients. How do you feel when you go to a doctor still using paper, and wait 5 minutes for them to shuffle through file folders to find your chart?
edit: formatting