Simplee

I recently came across a new company called Simplee (http://simplee.com). It is a site that you can sign up with for free and link your health insurance account to in order to track, organize and manage your health care costs. Although those are wonderful reasons for anyone to use Simplee, the real value is going to come through all the data they are gathering as a by product of their stated goals and use cases.

In short order, Simplee will be able to tell what the contract rates for all procedures and services for each provider and any given insurance company. That is huge. But that information is proprietary, according to the insurance companies and the providers. I am not sure if this will result in a legal battle if they attempt to make that information public. It seems that, although private, the information should be able to be shared openly by individuals, which is Simplee's model. Each person allows Simplee to have access to their online health insurance account. By doing so, the individual allows Simplee access to their explanation of benefits (EOB) forms. These forms are required to be given each patient, by law, from the insurance companies. So, how can information given to the public be proprietary. Legal fight?

The bottom line is this. If light is shed on who pays who how much, then hospitals can't leverage against insurance companies for exorbitant rates of pay and vice versa. Procedure rates vary wildly from hospital to hospital even within the same town. How and why this happens is a mystery hidden behind that proprietary veil.

The ePatient community should jump on this opportunity like a swarm of bees. It can be a huge avenue for cost containment in health care.

Another company, Castlight Health, is trying to do a similar thing. Yet I do not know how they are going about gathering their data.

I must confess though, this post was hard to put out there. I had this idea to "crowdsource" cost data from EOBs months ago and could not ever get it off the ground. Simplee has taken the same idea and done one better with their model. I hope they have more than a wildly successful company. It will definitely disrupt.