It looks more like a tool for finding a big-box store – like Target – than for buying health insurance. HealthSherpa has stripped HealthCare.gov down to its bare bones to make the shopping function actually work.
Michael Wasser, George Kalogeropoulos and Ning Liang built the site last month. Liang and Kalogeropoulos are co-founders of RentMetrics, a company that uses data and analytics techniques to crunch data about residential rentals. The company is backed by venture capital, angel investors and the Ycombinator startup accelerator. Wasser is a cloud services architect and an independent consultant focused on healthcare and education.
The design of the site is very simple and does a good job highlighting only as much information as a person needs. It’s obvious that these guys understand how people search for and consume information on the web much better than any of the people behind HealthCare.gov.
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Jess Bidgood of the In Practice blog on The New York Times spoke with one of the founders:
While the site offers instructions on how to sign up for a desired plan, it does not allow users to do so on the site; nor can it authenticate users or verify their incomes, as healthcare.gov is intended to do.
“There’s one little niche of finding plan data,” Mr. Wasser said. He added that the site was by no means intended to replace the federal website. “The whole HealthCare.gov website does many other things.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Wasser said, the site has amassed more than 1.4 million page views. “How to buy” buttons posted next to each plan, which take users to instructions, have been clicked 152,000 times.
Even this site has its glitches. I entered my zip code and the site returned a message that this zip covered two counties. When I selected the correct one and hit change, the site flipped me back to the home page so I could start my search all over again. This happened three times. This may be due to bad data from HealthCare.gov. The site designers have acknowledged that there are some issues with the accuracy of the data available from the federal site.
The screenshots below show how the designers present complex information in a simple, concise way.
