One of the frustrating things about healthcare data is that they live in silos, so the user experience is far from seamless. Checking insurance eligibility, scheduling appointments and paying a bill each involves a separate interaction.
But that's becoming unacceptable with the growth of high-deductible health plans and the corresponding wave of healthcare consumerism. Health systems and insurers need a platform that functions more like Amazon or Kayak.
For Pokitdok, a San Mateo, Calif.-based technology company, the proliferation of high-deductible plans provided a “use case” for its platform. Patient experience suddenly mattered a lot more, and technology needed to catch up.
“We just kept asking ourselves the fundamental questions,” said Lisa Maki, Pokitdok's CEO, “and then we built it.”
A simple way to think about Pokitdok is to picture the operating system on Apple's iPhone. It has a number of native apps built in, but other software developers can also build on top of it. Pokitdok is like the iOS. It offers a number of “apps” for free—including software for checking a patient's insurance eligibility and claims history—and it charges a monthly fee, by number of transactions, for software developers that want access to its library. Enterprise customers also pay a subscription fee to access its platform and pre-built applications.