Christopher Matrumalo, the Vice President of MyMedicalShopper, discussed the medical shopping tool for transparency of health care costs with Fred Kocher.
The health care cost in the United States has increased up to 3%.
MyMedicalShopper is an innovative healthcare comparison-shopping platform. It makes shopping for medical tests and procedures easy, helping billions to save on their health care costs. The company is located in Portsmouth.
It has developed a medical shopping tool, which is a costing tool for typical outpatient procedures. The tool uses a variety of medical claims data, which is purchased for employees use. The company claims that with this tool, the average employer can save more on health care costs.
Christopher Matrumalo said, “Mark Galvin (the founder of MyMedicalShopper) was a serial tech entrepreneur. He was on driven health plans and health savings account and paying for his medical accounts and six years ago, a nuclear stress test. And Mark asked how long that’s going to cost, long story short, he couldn’t get an answer. He asked everyone he could think of, couldn’t get an answer and here we are.”
There are some hidden variations in health care discount prices, which is especially greater in the Portsmouth area within a 25-mile radius, such as chest x-ray, cholesterol screening, and nuclear stress test.
One can see the low and the high cost, and the variation as you go through the graphic. Chris explained that the medical shopping tool displays variations and prices. And they can find a great variation.
The Vice President of MyMedicalShopper said, “We started digging into the price variation. These are reflective of the insurance negotiated discounts. A lot of people think, oh, I have insurance, they get me the best price and they don’t realize that that price varies whether they go to provider A or B. And this is some of the procedures.”
“The tool is mostly for outpatients,” said Matrumalo. “We work with really progressive, proactive consultants, advisors, health benefits and brokers and third-party administrators who administer the consumer-driven plans and we integrate our solutions with them. What we do is bring this information to employers; it’s really a three-pronged approach.”
The tool is to make sure that employees have access to all the information. It can influence a decision about where they would go when they are in their doctor’s office. One can take their phone out of their pocket and a mobile app and they can compare the prices.
Chris further mentioned, “We know when you’re choosing to shop for anything, you care about quality as well as price and that’s certainly true in medicine.” “We look at a variety of sources, huge data sets of post adjudicated claims data. We’re looking at what insurance companies and participants actually paid for these procedures at every provider.” Many employers can save money on their health care costs by using the medical shopping tool. That is indeed a great opportunity.
