DrChrono Lets Doctors Accept Payments Via Square, View Real-Time Insurance Info

If you're looking for a truly disruptive startup, you should tackle insurance billing. This is a $1 Trillion+ industry powered by people making phone calls and sending paper mail.<p>Just look at this list of insurance payers: <a href="https://drchrono.com/public_payer_search/" rel="nofollow">https://drchrono.com/public_payer_search/</a>. See how they all have different enrollment forms? Every clinic that wants to do electronic billing with insurance has to fill out an enrollment form for every insurer on that list (though most only do a subset). Filling out those forms is powered by people.<p>For those of you that haven't dealt with insurance, a real-time eligibility checker is actually a huge deal. The best of class eligibility providers define "real-time" as "we'll respond within five minutes to your request, and only between the hours of 8am and 6pm Eastern, and often the service will be down for many of those hours, and requests will fail randomly, and we can handle a full 10 requests per minute." When clinics get eligibility information wrong they end up eating the cost of service or sending out a huge unexpected bill to the patient.<p>(Actually, it looks like DrChrono is using Emdeon, which has many of the problems described above.)<p>The (stealthy) biotech startup at which I work has to deal with a huge number of insurance companies. I've been working on insurance claim integration and had to build out a parser for the absurd file format standard the healthcare industry uses (<a href="https://github.com/sbuss/TigerShark" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sbuss/TigerShark</a>). We're parsing and handling claim acceptance/denials pretty well (resulting in, literally, a 300x boost in productivity of our billing &#38; support team).

The state of Healthcare Informatics in virtually all its manifestations is outrageous. Do I think Dr Chrono is "the" solution? No. Does it help move the ball forward? Yes. And for that, I applaud them.

"Specifically, the company is adding two new features to its product line-up today: iPhone patient payment processing, which allows doctors and staff to process payments using the Square card reader attached to an iPhone or iPod Touch..."<p>Isn't the whole insurance problem that I'm not the one making the payments, my insurance company is?

I don't see the "major upgrade" here. As a doc you can already use Square to process payments, and you can look up "real time insurance information" easily already via the web.<p>Breathless pronouncements from a supposed technical company that physicians will use their app because it "makes them feel modern" are a trifle annoying. Docs will consider using an app like this when (if ever) it is demonstrated that input/dictation of specialized vocabulary is robust on pads, and when (if ever) there is something at all good to say about trusting a commercial third party to store a practice's protected health information remotely, eg when (if ever) questions about security, access levels and logging, deletion, and backup policies of remote data storage of protected health info are fully addressed.