HealthWiz guides employees to convenient and cost-effective healthcare decisions and lowers healthcare costs by eliminating wasted spend. We help users understand what’s wrong and how to get better quickly and cost-effectively.
While lowering costs frequently means taking away benefits, we do the opposite — we bring transparency and information to a messy healthcare system that allows employees to better navigate their benefits, resulting in less wasted spend and a faster return to health.
This is personal for us. When Nate Maslak's mom needed to find a doctor for joint pain, she went to one physician, then another, then another. Six months and thousands of dollars later, she still wasn’t better and gave up on looking. Nate and I found it ludicrous that despite all the information available to us, healthcare remained opaque and intimidating.
Without HealthWiz, we have to scour the web for (often biased) information for what’s wrong and take our best guess at how to find treatment, only to be shocked by the bill. Our goal is to help you triage your symptoms with AI and access the most convenient ways to get better while knowing the cost in advance.
We’d love to get your feedback on the product (i.e. would you want your employer to offer this?) and look forward to discussing the nitty-gritty of just how we do all this, if people are interested!
A lot of the tech we've built is focused on integrating with US insurance plans, but we have been starting to get asks from some of our clients about offering our solution in other markets as well, so we can definitely see efforts like ours expanding internationally. In the short term we're focused on serving US companies who are struggling with rising healthcare costs, but perhaps there's an opportunity to partner on the tech related to things like our symptom checker and condition content.
From a mission standpoint of helping everyone get access to better healthcare, that's something where we definitely align strongly. We'll reach out to see if they might find any of our technology useful -- would be an amazing partner!
[edited for grammar + expanding on a point]
After a particular selection you might have tree of max depth 10, but with the other selection you land on a tree of max depth 5, for example.
Personally, I've love to see a list of the conditions whose probabilities are increasing and decreasing with each selection. This may not be suitable for the average consumer, but it would be very educational! And also fun.
Ultimately, to your point, we learned that at times it can scare users more than it can help them (e.g., if a condition goes from 0.5% to 1%)... not to say that we can't do that above a certain threshold.
We'll keep testing this. Is there a certain minimum probability you'd want to see before seeing a condition (e.g., if something is 1% matching vs 10% vs 70%)?
Bladder infections, also known as Urinary tract infections (UTIs), are common infections that can affect the bladder, the kidneys and the tubes connected to them.
https://www.myhealthwiz.com/condition_overview/100156
:)
How do you convince employers that this service is in their best interest?
However, that's a very indirect path. Most employers use a separate insurance carrier (Humana, Blue Cross, Cigna, etc) and adjust costs on a ~yearly basis by shopping around. HealthWiz would probably love to go to market by integrating with these insurers, and offering an incentive to employers whose members make use of the HealthWiz product to save money.
That's a tough way to go to market because you have to convince an insurance company to trial your thing with their customers. Insurance companies have deeply risk-averse cultures. Plus you have to actually achieve significant cost savings for individuals who use HealthWiz, and wide enough usage throughout the employer, to make the insurer comfortable with offering a discount for that population.
Two other potential markets are self-insured employers and accountable care organizations. Self-insured employers are companies (or often, government agencies) huge enough that rather than paying an insurance carrier, they just operate their own, and pay for healthcare directly. These folks feel the costs a little more urgently and may be easier to pilot with.
Accountable care orgs (ACOs) are a relatively newer model, where the ACO operator (usually a hospital/health system) receives a fixed per-person amount to address all the health needs of a population. These orgs are probably the most informed about both cost and medical needs, and are making real strides in long-term cost saving measures like improving preventive care. But because they're so different from insurers and employers, they'd probably need a somewhat different product, likely one that maintains the primacy of their brand (and maybe doesn't do things like suggest that cheaper hospital a few miles away).
For example, ERs frequently take in patients hoping to get a UTI treated. Much of the time, the right treatment is a prescription. But, going to the ER to get the diagnosis can cost ~$2K (split between the employer and the employee) and take as long as 12 hours of waiting in the waiting room.
In this case, if a patient uses a telemedicine provider for the same service, they're likely to get the same diagnosis and prescription but the visit will cost ~$50.
The nearly $2K in savings would go to both the employee and employer, the employee saves money and is able to get treatment faster.
Your go to market strategy is exciting also. Health care can be a terribly frustrating industry to start a business. Best of luck!
And agreed on the trickiness of starting a business in healthcare. Many factors that drive economics/incentives/needs, and requires a lot of thought toward thinking how to best align many different interests. Definitely helps to be mission driven!
(1) Generally slightly more scrolling than I'd like. I'm on a MBPro 13" and if I have more than 1 symptom then I have to scroll down to see what they are (should I decide to remove some).
What does help is that the "Possible Matches" button is just high enough for me to not have to scroll to notice it pop up. Something to keep an eye on if more things get added to this page since it'll be important for users to know when the questions they're answering are leading to possible matches.
(2) Clicking "X" to remove my single symptom brings me back to the check symptoms starting point. This makes sense, but I noticed there's a message on that page that says "Something went wrong in the browser -- please try again."
Would suggest only having that error message appear if user got there because of an actual error (seems to be a result of reusing a page for multiple purposes).
https://www.myhealthwiz.com/symptoms?status=restart
(3) Got to this question: "Do your symptoms begin during your period or a few days before?"
But the options were Yes, No, and Don't Know. Doesn't really match what the question was asking.
https://www.myhealthwiz.com/healthwiz_symptom_question?gende...
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Otherwise, great work! Here are a few things I really liked:
- Being able to see the original symptoms I added and the option to remove them
- Seeing potential matches appear as I answer clarifying questions
- Estimates of options (Online Doctor, Visit, etc.)
How do you guys differentiate?
Are you targeting a specific market? (Geographic, specific health plans, procedures, etc.)
Who do you need? (Payor partners, employer types to test with, ...?)
Many companies in the navigation ecosystem today provide call centers that members/employees can call to get help. Unfortunately, these models have a hard time scaling to the midsize market -- our tech solution is able to scale for this market.
If you're interested, would love if you tried the next version that we're working on. Our goal is that it will be able to better handle cases like these (which happen about 10% of the time right now -- which is a lot and in our minds leaves a lot of room for improvement.)
1) in step 2, after you click on Yes/No/Don't Know, there isn't enough feedback in the product that indicates that you successfully answered the question. I originally thought that the web request failed to send and didn't notice that the two questions presented were different.
2) When does a person ever reach step 3? It doesn't appear to be the case for me, you can circumvent reaching step 3 thru the possible matches. I think this is misleading and confusing.
1) That's a great point -- we should make that more clear that the user answered the question (and not seem like its broken if the questions are similar)
2) The way it currently works is we wait until the symptom checker has reached high enough confidence to render the results. Sometimes this can take 15+ questions, which we've found to be frustrating to the user. So we've designed the tool to give the user lots of ways to exit the symptom checker toward taking action (learning more about a relevant condition, or getting help to find a doctor, etc). To your point, I think we definitely need to make it clear that step 3 isn't the goal per say -- that there are multiple ways to exit the tool, and it's not just only answering enough questions to get to a high enough level of confidence
Quick heads up. I tried filling out the example you listed "strep throat" and got the error "Sorry, we do not have any results for "strep throat"" (https://www.myhealthwiz.com/condition_search?query=strep%20t...)
In the short term, if you click on the autocomplete results or select any of them, it'll bring you to the content page. (See here: http://imgur.com/a/XFdOg)
Also in the meantime, the link to the Strep Throat article is: http://www.myhealthwiz.com/condition_overview/101558
Again, thank you so much for flagging!
We're releasing a new and improved version of the symptom tool next month -- if you're interested, would love to have you try it once it's ready!
And sincerely sorry to hear about your neck fracture. Best wishes from us that you're getting great care for an as quick and painless recovery as possible.
[edited]
Have you tested this page for mobile users?
As for how the AI itself specifically works, given the data it has on the stated symptoms (Fever, Sore Throat, Chills, etc), it has based on prior data a best guess of the top conditions correlated with those symptoms.
Then, it asks a question that can help inform its calculations, which has simple boolean answers (True this symptom exists, False it does not exist). Then, the ranking of conditions updates, and the API responds with the next symptom it is curious about to drive towards a smarter diagnosis.
[edited for grammar]
