A family tragedy and a compassionate desire to help ease people’s steps through the healthcare maze led Christopher Parks to launch change:healthcare. And thousands today are better off because of it.
A career healthcare executive, Parks had stints at companies that included Healthways, HealthCare Microsystems, National Seating & Mobility and Global Healthcare Exchange (previously Neoforma). But two years ago, personal events dramatically changed his life.
In 2006, he lost both parents to cancer. In working through the piles of medical bills, invoices and explanation of benefits (EOBs) that accompanied their care, Parks found himself unable to make heads or tails of all the paperwork. “Which doctor has been paid? Who still needs to be paid? How much? I’ve never heard of this physician so why is he sending a bill? Has insurance properly reimbursed my parent’s estate? Have we paid too much?”
Despite having worked seventeen years in healthcare, Parks learned that sorting through mountains of medical bills and related documents was more than frustrating. It was almost impossible. And not nearly as much fun as a colonoscopy.
The executive was exasperated. The healthcare system shouldn’t be this confusing, nor its paperwork so overwhelming, he reasoned… especially at such a difficult time for people. Even more, he felt consumers needed access to much more information in order to make reasonably intelligent healthcare decisions for themselves and their families. So the entrepreneur united a variety of programmers and created a product he called MedBillManager, a web-based tool aimed at helping consumers organize, track and manage their medical bills. It also helped them compare costs and quality with their peers in secure confidence.
Stephen Girdley, an Atlanta medical equipment salesman, began using the tool after taking his then two-year-old son to roughly four doctor appointments a week. Inundated with bills and EOBs, the confusing mound of paper made it difficult for him to answer questions from his insurance company. “If you get a lot of medical bills, wow, that can be really confusing,” he said. But the online system helped him get organized and provided him a single summary of all bills, which made talking to his insurance company easier.
The product put consumers back in the healthcare driver seat just as the new dynamic of consumer-driven healthcare was gaining traction. The tool has since been profiled in Oprah magazine and the Wall Street Journal.
Joining with fellow entrepreneur Robert Hendrick, who had launched a series of successful technology and healthcare ventures and had his own story to tell of premature twins spending months in an intensive care nursery, Parks created a new company – change:healthcare – and transformed MedBillManager into the “change:healthcare bill management tool.” The company’s mission: To promote transparency in the healthcare industry by following the dollar for the consumer.
Radical concept, huh?
Today, change:healthcare (www.changehealthcare.com) is a healthcare consumerism and claims platform that enables employers and their employees to become smarter healthcare consumers. With compelling information about healthcare providers, prescriptions, health issues and insurances, the Health 2.0 company provides self-insured employers a visibility into their healthcare costs, while simultaneously engaging employees to take control of their healthcare benefits and make smarter decisions that save everyone time and money.
The company recently re-launched a rating tool it calls “Medstimate,” which profiles what healthcare providers nationwide accept as negotiated prices for their services. Its newest product, to be launched shortly, is called the “Healthcare Consumerism Index (HCI),” and helps both employers and employees assess the cost-effectiveness of their individual healthcare decisions and the impact on personal and company budgets.
“As a vice president of HR at a healthcare management firm, I would stand before our employees and conduct meetings about the company’s healthcare program,” says Chiara Bell, CEO and Founder of ENURGI, a web-based healthcare service company that connects families and patients in need with local healthcare resources. “I preached to them about data and using information before they made a healthcare purchase (to keep costs down), yet at the time of their purchase, doctor visit or surgery, the employee had nowhere to compare pricing, physicians or quality of services. Enter change:healthcare, all with the focused effort to fill the information void for healthcare consumers.”
Chris Hartnett, a registered representative at employee benefit firm Roussel and Associates, agrees that change:healthcare is a valuable tool, and recently signed up for the company’s corporate support package to help with the claims management work he does for clients. “I don’t believe we need to just throw up our hands and do nothing about the price of healthcare,” he says. “I like what this company is doing – they are independent. They have no stake in the game, they aren’t a hospital or insurance company.”
Interestingly, change:healthcare still has few competitors. On the cutting edge of a new product category, only a small handful of companies offer similar services and change:healthcare appears to be the only one that combines quality insights and the true cost of healthcare.
So, the result of Christopher Park’s personal pain? Empowered consumers, engaged employees and innovative employers now have tools to help them make sound healthcare decisions and begin lowering their healthcare costs. At this time, more than 15,000 users are sharing vital information concerning more than 2.5 million providers and 10,000 medical services through the change:healthcare platform.
Who says heartbreak can’t morph into something truly helpful for people? change:healthcare thinks it can.
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