So we’ve done it. After months of work, debate, bug squashing, and not a small amount of caffeine, we have launched the new user interface for MedBillManager. We have done our best to make the new interface intuitive, fun, and most of all, flexible.

One of our biggest realizations throughout the development process has been that no two users are going to think of their medical expenses in the same way. Some people think of them in terms of family members. Others think of them in terms of the reason for visit. Still others think of them in terms of the provider visited. We have done our best to ensure that no matter how you think about your medical expenses, MedBillManager will be able to accomodate you.

I’m not going to sit here and blab about all the great new features we have built in, for that you can head on over to the splash page, or go ahead and sign up for a free trial. But let me assure you, there are a TON of great new features in the new MedBillManager.

Christopher, Katrina, Robert, Beale, you all deserve a HUGE pat on the back for making this a reality. Without all of you guys this never would have happened. Congrats to the entire team.

Everyone out there, I highly recommend giving MedBillManager a try…I promise it will make managing your medical expenses MUCH easier, and it is a great first step towards putting the power of healthcare back into the hands of consumers.

Let’s face it, nobody really enjoys dealing with (and paying for) their medical bills. But everyone wants to know the same things: “did I receive and send all of the correct forms, and did I pay too much?” In addition they might think to themselves “could this be made easier, and could I be paying less?” As we have been working on the development of MedBillManager, a tool to manage medical expenses, these questions have been constantly in our minds.

In dealing with medical bills, people’s attitudes can be generalized into three stereotypes: the obsessively organized, the apathetic, and the occasional enthusiast.

The obsessively organized person is likely to organize, file, and store every scrap of paper that comes in the mail and is related to his or her medical treatments. In addition, such people most likely spend much more time scrutinizing their bills and EOBs before making payments, and have surely spotted their fair share of errors that others would have missed.

The apathetic person has resigned him or herself to the fate of not understanding everything that comes in the mail related to medical expenses. A piece of paper comes to such people, it tells them to pay someone something, and they do it. End of story. When an EOB shows up, they might take a brief look at it, but it most likely doesn’t take long to move from their hand to the trash (or an unorganized drawer of papers).

The occasional enthusiast is a bit of an odd case. This person has usually been either thrust into a round of serious medical treatments or has come across some sort of glaring error in a bill or EOB. For a while, this person will scrutinize and organize his or her medical documents almost as closely as the obsessively organized. Yet for such people the fervor soon dies out when their life returns to normal, or they decide there simply isn’t enough time to deal with all of the paperwork.

None of these three types of people is able to most effectively deal with their medical expenses. The obsessively organized spends entirely too much time handling all of the various documents received, time that could be much better spent elsewhere. The apathetic individual has most likely been mis-charged or mis-reimbursed a number of times, and this will continue to happen. The occasional enthusiast wastes too much time when the original fervor kicks in, and then as it wanes is most likely to get the same incorrect charges or reimbursements as does the apathetic individual.

So what are the options? First of all you could outsource your medical bill management to a review service. Although such services are surely made up of individuals skilled in dealing with medical bills, it is quite costly and involves giving control of your documents to another individual. Some people may not want the details of their medical treatments revealed to anyone but themselves and their providers.

The other option that is emerging is the ability to use your PC and/or the Internet to make managing your medical bills easier and less time consuming. While of course MedBillManager is one such option, Revolution Health also provides such tools, as do a few others. And these options, we believe, provide a path to a future that empowers individuals to effectively and painlessly manage their medical bills.

Let it be said that no service is perfect yet, and probably never will be. But the progress being made is exciting. One thing we believe is most appealing about MedBillManager is the ability to compare your costs rather than just manage them. Combining such comparisons with strong management and organization tools will hopefully provide a satisfactory answer to all of the questions mentioned at the beginning of this post, the questions that really matter to health care consumers.

This past week change:healthcare, along with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, announced a partnership to help MS patients better navigate the healthcare system. The two will launch an innovative co-branded pilot program using MedBillManager, an online tool to help consumers more effectively manage and evaluate their healthcare expenses. Members will be able to go online and manage their medical expenses, as well as compare them with others in their area receiving comparable services. MS users will receive a discount, paying only $19.95 annually to manage up to 12 family members.

We at change:healthcare are very excited to have the chance to work with the MS Society and its members, providing them with tools that will help them manage their condition, and hopefully improve the quality and cost efficiency of their medical care. A big thanks to all who have made this partnership a reality.

For the full press release, click here.

An internal memo addressing the movie “SiCKO,” leaked to Michael Moore by a Capital BlueCross employee, is making the rounds on the Internet today. After its original posting on Moore’s site, it moved to Crooks and Liars, and eventually to Boing Boing.

Crooks and Liars says the memo shows that “SiCKO has Blue Cross scrambling.” Boing Boing sums up the memo as an attempt to “stop the bleeding,” paraphrasing Barclay Fitzpatrick’s part of the memo thus: “people are fat and lazy, and that makes it hard to run an HMO. Michael Moore was mean to us. He should be nicer. Some people don’t hate HMOs.”

Despite what people may want to believe, the memo doesn’t appear to be anything as drastic as what is suggested by the above two postings. Blue Cross, and many others, took a PR hit thanks to this movie, and now they are addressing it as anyone would. Simple as that. And although Moore claims that the memo is an attempt at “discounting the film,” it surely doesn’t seem that way to me. In fact, one line of the memo specifically states “the most successful strategy will not be in attacking the movie for its weaknesses or misperceptions.” The memo basically lays out information that can be used by employees and others in response to questions directed towards them arising from the movie.

But no matter how you view it, it’s great to see healthcare and the desire to change it rising in popularity across the web. Maybe leaks and responses like these will make insurers think twice about how they conduct business.

You can download the memo (in PDF format) here.

Today the New York Times released an article detailing the importance of healthcare reform in the upcoming 2008 elections, as well as outlining the various strategies (in very general terms) from candidates on both the right and left of the political spectrum. As the article notes, the proposals from the right and left are markedly different. Proposals from Republicans, “by and large, promise to expand coverage by using a variety of tax incentives to empower consumers to by it themselves, from private insurers.” Democrats also propose “strengthening the private-employer-based system,” but “also see a strong role for government, including…new requirements that individuals obtain insurance and that employeres provide it, along with substantial new government spending to subsidize coverage for people who cannot afford it.”

However it seems that on both the right and the left, candidates are somewhat missing the point. Their proposals do nothing to truly change the healthcare system itself, but rather simply shift the existing burdens in various ways. For example, “new government spending” means using tax dollars (the money has to come from somewhere), which means the burden for healthcare remains on the consumer, albeit in the form of taxes. The “free market approach” taken by many Republicans, on the other hand, is likely to simply encourage the continuance of existing practices, despite the promise of “affordable and portable free-market solutions.” How free-market solutions are magically going to become affordable is not mentioned, probably because it would include a system of tax credits or incentives which, once again, inevitably put the burden of cost on the consumers in the form of taxes.

Yet there is one element that, in combination with either of the above two strategies, could actually change healthcare: insurance and provider information transparency. If providers and insurers were made accountable for their charges, whether in the form of publicly posted rates or through some sort of yearly reports provided to the government for later release, both government subsidized and/or free-market strategies towards health care would be more effective.

Why? First of all, any such publication or availability of this information is likely to breed true competition within the industry. If both consumers and government entities (in the case of providing subsidized healthcare programs) are clearly provided with the costs and benefits of both providers and insurances when choosing healthcare coverage, their decisions will allow them to indirectly put pressure on higher cost and lower benefit providers and insurers. If these providers and/or insurers don’t raise benefits or lower costs, they will be forced out of the market. The biggest difference here is that both consumers and government will no longer be making a “blind” decision, or at best a marginally informed one, they will shop for healthcare just as they do for any other commodity.

Second of all, if such information were to become widely available, it would change the existing burden of cost into a burden of decision making. Whereas before consumers basically paid what they were told, in this case they will have the option to shop around and find the best deal. If they make a bad decision (assuming there is information transparency), it is their fault, but at least they have the option to change that decision. The same goes for government. With information transparency the government would be held accountable for the insurers and providers with which it would contract to provide healthcare. It would be expected that the government should choose providers and insurers with the highest benefit and lowest cost possible, rather than simply choosing blindly.

That being said, it doesn’t seem likely that any of the existing candidates will push for such widespread information transparency. That is one of the driving reasons behind our development of both MedBillManager and FindYourDoc. Until the decision is made to allow consumers to make informed decisions, we at change:healthcare are going to do everything possible to do it anyway.