

DrChrono Lets Doctors Accept Payments Via Square, View Real-Time Insurance Info - jroll
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/07/drchrono-now-lets-patients-pay-doctors-via-square-see-real-time-insurance-info-on-ipad/

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buss
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).

~~~
jasontraff
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.

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siculars
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.

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DoctorHouse
"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?

~~~
__abc
I had a similar reaction.

I guess this would be for co-pays, or the balance owed for what isn't covered
by the insurance company.

~~~
jroll
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.

[1] <http://d.pr/i/Ulh5>

edit: added a bit more detail

------
logjam
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.

~~~
jroll
> 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?

edit: formatting

