Sunday, August 28, 2005

Healthia

Introducing a new Bessemer-funded consumer venture...

My previous post celebrated Consumer Driven Healthcare (CDH), the new development in American healthcare reform. CDH promises to stabilize premiums for employers, cut out-of-pocket expenses for employees, and improve the quality of healthcare through freer competition.

But consumers are unaccustomed to shopping for medical services, and there are no available data on the price, quality and service of competing providers. A McKinsey study concluded that "this is the huge challenge of the CDHC movement. If consumers are to welcome new incentives to manage their health care and spending, they must have better information to support their decisions." (via this report on CDH).

So we have incubated a company in concert with founders from Healtheon and Valicert to build a portal for delivering the information and online shopping resources that healthcare consumers have come to expect when buying other goods and services. According to Healthia's About US page: "Our goal is to provide America's first comparison shopping and research portal for consumer driven healthcare, enabling businesses and their employees to choose health plans and ancillary health benefits objectively and transparently."

Please visit our California-only beta site and give us feedback. We're starting with just the first steps toward consumer driven healthcare--setting up an HSA and HSA-eligible plan.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:04 PM

    Your link to the company is broken, and shows up as "http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/www.healthia.com"

    ReplyDelete