San Francisco-based Remedy helps patients avoid overpaying for medical care by using big data and technology to audit medical bills and correct any mistakes.
The company, which was founded in late 2015 and went public last month, has a network of medical billing contractors who review patients' claims via their insurance company. Remedy identifies errors and overcharges and then works with providers, hospitals and insurance companies to get the patient's costs down by resolving errors and even negotiating correct bills lower. The service is free, but the company takes a 20 percent cut of any money it saves the patient, with a maximum fee of $99 per bill.
"Even absurdly obvious errors can go undetected by patients, and it's everything from the mundane to the super complicated. Most of the time the bill you get in the mail is really obfuscated and opaque," said Victor Echevarria, Remedy CEO and co-founder. "You take an immensely complicated system with all sorts of errors and you combine that with the higher deductible world we have now, and people are needlessly spending thousands of dollars out of pocket. So we built Remedy to fix it. We plug into your insurance company — not unlike what Mint does with your bank accounts — the patient gives us their credentials, and we monitor for claims. We hope to offer a layer of protection between our patients and the broken billing system."
Mr. Echevarria recently spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about how Remedy started and why its focus is medical billing.
Note: Interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What sparked the idea for Remedy?
Victor Echevarria: We estimate that based on various external data, patients lose $120 billion each year as a result of medical billing errors and overcharges — that's $1,000 for every family in the U.S. The founders saw a way to keep people out of financial ruin with a technology platform and network of medical billing specialists that can efficiently correct these errors at a massive scale. While launching the company, I experienced this firsthand when my son's trip to the emergency room turned into a financial nightmare thanks to incorrectly denied claims. My personal experience galvanized his belief that Remedy's platform and technology will protect the average family from thousands of needlessly billed dollars.
Q: Why did Remedy choose to focus on billing?
VE: Medical billing is hard for a layperson to understand, with countless billing codes for every little thing (there's something like 90 different codes for an angioplasty, for example). By combining our technology with a team of medical billing specialists who can take over the challenge of deciphering patient bills, spotting mistakes and most importantly, getting them resolved by knowing the right person to talk to and what to say, we can save Americans thousands, even millions of dollars each year. Just since launching our beta in December 2015, Remedy has saved users over $100,000 in incorrect medical bills and has found errors in over 70 percent of all complicated medical bills it has reviewed.
Q: What does 2017 hold for Remedy?
VE: Next year should be a very exciting year for us. We just opened up to the public and have seen a massive influx of new customers who want to take advantage of the service. We're also looking forward to making this even more accessible to all Americans, not just those with smartphones and/or internet access — most of our interaction with patients, should they choose, can occur over SMS. Part of the reason we look at all bills is because a $50 error can be incredibly meaningful to a large percentage of American families. According to Neal Gabler's article in The Atlantic earlier this year, 47 percent of Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency. We ultimately want to help everyone in the country, which means making our product accessible through multiple channels.