Surprise medical bills have been a concern of many consumers across the country but a new survey found that being able to check the cost of services — say, through a mobile app — could ease consumer concern and lead to more patients getting treatment.
Today Metova, a mobile and IoT company, released survey results indicating that 80 percent of patients surveyed would be more likely to visit a...
San Francisco-based Amino, which offers an online healthcare marketplace platform, has raised $25 million in Series C funding. Highland Capital Management led the round, and Accel, Aspect Ventures, CRV, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Pilot Wall Group and others contributed. Previously, the company raised a little over $19 million, and this new investment brings Amino’s total funding to date...
Denver, Colorado-based Spoke Health, a startup that makes a platform called SurgeryHub to help employees find lower prices for surgery, has launched out of stealth mode with an undisclosed round of seed funding. The round comes from a combination of angel investors, friends and family, and the managing director of a private equity fund.
Spoke Health is aiming to tackle the process of healthcare...
The problem of bias is one of the potential pitfalls of creating a healthcare price transparency tool. If the tool is offered by an insurer or a hospital, consumers might not trust that the data is fair and accurate, rather than intended to drive them to a particular provider.
Fair Health, which recently launched a new consumer-facing app in the state of Connecticut, has an advantage in this...
Amino, a San Francisco-based startup that has built a free, online direct-to-consumer tool for finding a doctor, has added a cost estimator module to its offering. To begin with, the feature will calculate costs for 49 procedures and treatments, though more will be added over time. It includes 500,000 doctors nationwide and 129 health insurers.
The company uses claims data, algorithms, and human...
WebMD may soon begin to offer healthcare price transparency tools to users, and is even looking at becoming involved in telehealth, CEO David Schlanger said on a recent earnings call. Schlanger also talked about traffic and search trends, Medscape Consult, and the company’s video content strategy.
WebMD revenues hit $192.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2015, up from $162.7 million in Q4 2014,...
Nashville, Tennessee-based healthcare payment management company Emdeon has agreed to acquire Nashville-based price transparency company Change Healthcare for approximately $135 million cash upfront with an additional $50 million in potential earnouts. Change Healthcare has raised at least $34 million to date.
Emdeon offers revenue management tools to providers, claims management tools to payors...
In the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from Castlight Health have published what they believe is the first study linking price transparency to cost savings. The study of more than 500,000 Castlight users demonstrated modest savings for lab tests, advanced imaging, and clinician office visits.
"Although it is widely perceived that greater transparency of pricing...
This week, a Massachusetts law went into effect requiring health insurers to make realtime cost information publicly available, an unprecedented move. As WBUR reported recently, the initiative has already started to shine light on some galling price discrepancies for procedures like MRIs, surgeries, and lab tests (for instance, an MRI in Boston ranges from $614 to $1,800 with no discernible...
Former Wired executive editor Thomas Goetz and Matt Mohebbi, a former Google engineer, have teamed up to launch the drug-focused digital health startup Iodine, which Goetz unveiled this week at the Health 2.0 event in Santa Clara, California.
"There’s a massive amount of search traffic on medications," Goetz told MobiHealthNews. "People use the internet for health decisions as much as they use it...
