High-tech startup Collective Health challenges insurance industry
Joyce Park stashed this in Tech biz
Stashed in: Startups, Awesome, Startups, startup, Health, Improvement, Healthcare
Gratz to our friends at CollectiveHealth who are trying to do something better for consumers!
"It's sort of like how E-Trade replaced human stock brokers," said Ali Diab, CollectiveHealth co-founder who had stints at Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. "Insurance companies aren't actually insuring your health. They are middlemen, and all they do is make money off of the difference between premiums they charge and the claims that are paid. We are making software that replaces their paper-based manual process and extracting them from the equation."
Disrupting an inefficient middleman is something software likes to do.
The insurance industry is badly in need of software to make prices more reasonable.
San Mateo company CollectiveHealth launches Tuesday with a new way to deliver health insurance -- tossing the complicated explanation of benefits and indecipherable bills, and replacing insurance paperwork and administrative red tape with software.
I've been designing the backend of this system. It's a sweet SOA stack written in half Go, half Java. Focus is on reliability and security.
Company culture is open, transparent and everyone is unusually dedicated to the mission. It's been great!
I would LOVE for you to succeed at your mission:
CollectiveHealth says its services are about 20 percent to 25 percent cheaper than buying from traditional insurers that charge a fixed rate, because it's a lean startup with just 25 employees and its software replaces much of the administrative work traditional insurance companies pay people to do, and charge employers for.
More launch coverage:
9:11 AM Aug 12 2014