Intuit, the do-your-taxes, make-your-will and manage-your-rental-properties company, now wants to conquer the most complex document of all: the medical bill.
Ohio is the company’s main market to test its new Web-based software, Quicken Health Expense Tracker. Health insurer CIGNA alreadyhas started using software, and UnitedHealthcare Group has signed on to use it. Medical Mutual of Ohio plans to give customers access to the software in August or September, and plans to be the first insurer to let customers pay physicians through the software. The payment feature will be only available to Medical Mutual customers in the Buckeye State.
Intuit and the insurers are promising a new approach for patients and a painless transition for physicians.
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“If we achieve what we want, everybody wins. We transform the way people manage health-care finance,” said Peter Karpas, senior vice president and general manager for Quicken Health Expense Tracker.
Billing errors are a scourge for patients and providers alike. As many at eight of every 10 medical bills have a mistake, said Candy Butcher, chief executive of Medical Billing Advocates of America, a patient advocacy group that in recent years has offered bill-review services for consumers and businesses.
Intuit thinks it’s taken the simplicity that made its financial software famous, and added tools to help patients challenge medical errors and manage their health-care expenses. Medical bills are downloaded into a customer’s account, and every charge includes a simplified definition of the medical procedure, how much an insurer has paid and what a customer owes.
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The bill includes advice and contact information for correcting billing mistakes. Plus, customers can keep their Expense Tracker accounts when they change employers or insurance companies (as long as the new insurer also uses Expense Tracker).
(A demo video created by Intuit for CIGNA customers is on the left.)
Karpas said the software can cut health-care costs for patients, insurers and providers. About 40 percent of health-care phone inquiries are about billing claims, according to Intuit’s research. Because Expense Tracker’s primary functions are to explain health expenses and navigate the billing process, it would cut down on those calls, Karpas said.
Expense Tracker is Intuit’s second attempt at health-records management. Its first was no TurboTax. Consumers generally panned the original Medical Expense Tracker as bulky and labor-intensive. Karpas called it “the right problem and the right product except for one humongous thing: too much manual data entry.” Users had to type in all their medical information themselves.
“That’s too much work for the vast majority of people,” Karpas said. “We learned a lot.”
Intuit also thinks Expense Tracker can overcome privacy concerns that bedevil companies that want to put health information online. This is the same company Americans trusts to process tax information and manage small businesses.
However, Intuit isn’t bound by HIPAA health-privacy regulations. Karpas said it will use “HIPAA’s intent” to protect customer privacy.
According to Quicken Health Expense Tracker’s privacy policy, Intuit will anonymously share users’ health-care habits with other companies that market goods and services. It also will keep customer’s health information after they cancel the service. Karpas said that’s because Intuit backs up all its data and stores it in a secure location. It would be too troublesome to find and delete backed up information when a customer leaves, he said.
When Medical Mutual offers Expense Tracker later this year, customers can pay their doctors — even if doctors haven’t registered with Intuit’s service, said Bob Mau, Medical Mutual’s vice president of eBusiness. Intuit said it is too early to discuss details of the online payment system.
Mau said doctors would be charged a fee for every exchange — much like they are for each credit card transaction. Intuit declined to comment.
Mau said services like Expense Tracker are part of a new “business model for how a member deals with their health finances.” He praised how easy the service is to use — “Quicken health spoon-feeds you information,” he said — and predicted other offerings like it will give insurance companies a competitive advantage with their customers.
Physicians likely will welcome the new software — particularly if Intuit can cut confusion in billing, and perhaps cut the time between billing and payment, said Jason Koma, spokesman for the Ohio State Medical Association. “That helps speed the revenue cycle on the physicians side,” said Koma, who has reviewed the online demonstrations of the software but not used it.
Karpas said: “Physicians are already customers through QuickBooks, QuickBooks Payroll and all the different things we do — these are our customers, too. We’ve got no interest whatsoever in hurting them in any way.”
[Front-page photo courtesy of Flickr user wrestlingentropy]
