What Castlight Health is to people with employer-provided health insurance, PokitDok is to people with high deductible plans. The new “set your price” service for basic healthcare services may be what “consumer-driven healthcare” needs to become a realistic option instead of doublespeak.
On the PokitDok website and mobile app, a consumer can request a service — a sports physical, for example — and a quote from doctors on the site. She can specify payment by cash, health savings account or insurance. The providers reply and the person has a set price for the visit before walking into the office. The service is free to consumers. Doctors can receive and respond to quotes for free. Doctors can buy an annual license for using the complete platform. PokitDok offers a per-query fee as well.
CEO and co-founder Lisa Maki said that one of the company’s goals is price transparency for general medical care.
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“In 2014, we’re going to have 40 million people covered with high deductible insurance policies, some of these are people who have used the ER as primary care,” she said. “Consumers will have to get smarter and have to shop around, and we want to be there when that happens.”
Maki said PokitDok (pronounced “pocket doc”) also sells the platform to large, self-insured companies and unions so they can populate their private network.
When she started the company, the general reaction was: The docs will never show up.
“When I started asking around, I realized that there was a lot of cash pricing out there already,” she said. “An increasing number of docs were moving to all cash to simplify their businesses and spend more time with patients.”
PokitDok creates a basic page for a doctor with pre-populated data from a database of more than 3 million providers. The doctor can then claim the page and personalize it with pictures, services and prices. Providers set the rates.
Maki said that this structure puts doctors in charge of their business information and allows PokitDok to scale nationwide without hiring a big sales force. The startup is also incorporating Medicare reimbursement data into the system to help providers set a rate for cash transactions.
There are many startups working on various aspects of price comparisons for medical services: ClearHealthCosts, MDSave, Health in Reach.
In addition to helping people with high deductible plans, services like PokitDok may make medical tourism within the states easier. Maki said that one of her company’s clients is a surgical center in Charleston, South Carolina. The center offers a package that includes surgery and a stay in a resort before and after surgery.
“You can get anything from trigger finger to a shoulder replacement for less than it would cost you to get it at the hospital down the road,” she said.
Maki and co-founder Ted Tanner have been making software since the early ’90s. Maki joined Microsoft in 1989 right out of college and worked on the company’s early consumer products. She left in 1996, but went back 10 years later. A serial entrepreneur, Tanner was previously vice president of Core Systems at Benefitfocus and an architect at Apple and Microsoft.
PokitDok closed a seed round last spring.
“We had some institutional investors, including Jason Portnoy,” Maki said.
PokitDok will be in The Hive at TEDMED this week.
