Quicken Health Takes Pain Out of Medical Paperwork, Lays Groundwork for Better Interaction With Consumers

Consumers struggling on a daily basis to navigate a sea of health care paperwork – in the form of provider bills and benefits statements – soon will have a solution to what has become a complex question: who to pay, what to pay, and when to pay it, according to Bill Whitely, executive vice president of marketing for Ingenix.

“For consumers, managing the health care system’s financial aspects has been painful, inconvenient, confusing and labor-intensive for decades,” Whitely said, “and for decades people haven’t liked it.”

Ingenix is collaborating with Intuit Inc. – producer of such popular consumer financial solutions as Quicken and TurboTax – to develop Quicken Health, an online tool that will help consumers manage their out-of-pocket spending on medical bills. The tool, which will be launched in late 2007, meets an urgent consumer need: 82 percent of American households report that they spend significant time trying to organize, file and reconcile health information.

Quicken Health combines consumer know-how, technology

“Quicken Health really involves two parts,” Whitely said. “On the front end is what Intuit calls consumer-driven invention, which guides people through the paperwork so they feel more certain about the process and the steps they are taking,” he explained. “On the back end is simple, secure access to your individual information, put together by Ingenix. Your data downloads automatically so you don’t have to spend time key stroking it in.”

Ingenix is building Open Medical eXchange (OMX) – based on the finance industry’s Open Financial eXchange (OFX) – which captures and consolidates consumer health care data to facilitate smooth financial transactions in the health care setting. OMX collects medical data from a health plan’s system and formats it into messages for transmission to Intuit servers. “OMX ensures reliable, highly available and securely transmitted data while supporting health plans’ HIPAA and privacy regulation compliance,” according to Ingenix.

Consumers struggle to manage mounting paperwork

“Within households, what we have found is that consumers approach managing their medical paperwork in very different ways,” according to Whitely. “Some are meticulous, with elaborate filing systems, while others keep piling the paper on their desks and pay only when the collection notices come in,” he said.

When consumers use Quicken Health, they will feel like they “paid the right bills, for the right amount, at the right time, with a lot more confidence and a lot less labor,” he added.

Recognizing this need for a financial management tool in the health care space, Whitely approached Intuit, because Intuit “is so good at coming up with elegant and easy-to-use solutions to unglamorous problems,” he said. “There’s nothing glamorous about paying your bills or filing your taxes or managing your medical finances, but all three are labor-intensive.”

Intuit, Ingenix build an integrated solution

Intuit already was working on the concept behind Quicken Health when Whitely expressed interest in working together. According to Mike Battaglia, vice president of Healthcare Strategy for Intuit, an Intuit software engineer, Dan Robinson, already had designed a tool to help consumers handle their medical bills when faced with the challenge of handling the paper stemming from his child’s illness. “It struck him that he couldn’t be the only person who couldn’t make sense of it,” Battaglia said.

Robinson’s product, Quicken Medical Expense Manager, helps solve this problem. However, Intuit found that consumers did not like entering their own data into that system. “We saw an opportunity to grab information from different spaces and wanted to work with the best-in-class partner on the health care data side,” Battaglia said.

“Enter Ingenix, which is second-to-none in understanding and moving data across a system, knowing where it lives and how to consolidate it, and doing the analytics against it to empower a decision maker,” he added. “Bill coming to us was a ‘marketplace moment.’ We knew Ingenix would be a marquis collaborator.”

Quicken Health relieves consumer plight

Although some health plans are attempting to help consumers deal with medical care financial management by adding pieces of vendor software to their Web sites, that strategy is “really a kitchen-sink” approach that “asks of consumers more than they are able to do because it tells them to find their own way” to a solution, Battaglia commented.

Intuit’s consumer-driven, user-friendly strategy is based in part on a type of research that the firm calls “follow me homes” – whereby Intuit staff observe people trying to solve problems or complete tasks in their own homes, according to Battaglia. “You might say we have a high tolerance for cursing,” he said. “In fact, we delight in it, because it allows us to zero in on pain points.”

After witnessing such pain points and identifying the actual tasks that consumers were trying to accomplish with their medical bills, Intuit designed a solution that translates technical jargon and coding language into common language and “takes you by the virtual elbow to walk you through the complexity of the process,” he said. Usability labs have helped the company refine both the design and the workflow.

Insurers, employers also benefit from Quicken Health

Intuit and Ingenix are currently working with health plans and employers to provide Quicken Health to consumers, a move that can help deliver the member engagement and self-sufficiency that both health plans and employers have been seeking.   

According to Whitely, offering Quicken Health to plan members demonstrates that a health plan is forward-thinking and responsive to member concerns. "Payers want to help consumers make more optimal care decisions, but first they are going to have to help consumers deal with the time-consuming distraction of a growing pile of confusing paperwork."

Battaglia agreed, saying that plans “have an absolute vested interest” in giving people the tools that will equip them to make high-level decisions about value.

“We recognize that you can’t go from zero to sophisticated decision making overnight,” Battaglia said, “but by giving people a simple, easy to understand solution that takes the work out of understanding and managing health care finances, you are laying the foundation upon which the next level of engagement will come.”

Without Quicken Health, consumers are unlikely to entertain advice regarding their health. “Until you address the paperwork issue,” Whitely concurred, “consumers are not going to have the time or the bandwidth to have discussions about how to better manage their care.”

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