The new year will mark a product shift for San Francisco price transparency and appointment booking business Amino with the offer of health savings accounts. In a phone interview, CEO David Vivero explained how integrating the savings accounts with its healthcare navigation tools dovetails with the company’s drive to help people spend less on healthcare as a rise of high deductible health plans means they face more out-of-pocket costs.
Vivero observed that HSAs tend to be pushed on people but they often don’t use them because they don’t understand their advantages. Part of the company’s educational content has focused on educating users about HSAa in tandem with saving for healthcare.
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“Hospitals have become debt collection businesses,” Vivero observed. He sees HSAs as one way to address this issue.
Currently, about 28 percent of people with private insurance have health plans that use health savings accounts, according to data from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Vivero sees an opportunity for growth in this market.
The web-based interface and mobile app supporting HSAs will help users identify personal goals and include educational content on how much to save and when, according to the news release. Users can track transactions and upload receipts through text as well as Amino’s mobile apps.
Vivero said the company is building its HSA business organically —one-third of its staff is working on them.
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Amino plans to make HSAs available to employers in March with flexible options for employees on low and high deductible plans, according to the news release. Amino will roll out HSAs to individuals insured through the marketplace later this year. It plans to charge companies $2.50 per employee per month in the first year before increasing its rates to $4.00 per employee per month in 2019.
Offering HSAs seems like a dramatic shift for Amino but Vivero isn’t concerned with how it will affect the way people perceive his business because they have misunderstood the company before.
“We were originally perceived as competing with healthcare rating sites. When we added price transparency tools, people thought now we’re competing with them. People are asking the wrong questions. This bucket view categorization of healthcare companies is the wrong way to look at it…We should not be seeing the world in terms of classification of vendors but in the integration of the consumer experience.”
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