For those of you that don’t keep your eye on the Silicon Valley tech scene, you might have missed the launch of a company called Cake Health at TechCrunch Disrupt. From what I can tell, they were one of the most exciting companies coming out of the popular TechCrunch Disrupt event. Here’s a short description of what Cake Health offers:
…with Cake Health, you’ll never lose track of your healthcare expenses again. Our analytics monitor your out-of-pocket cost, and what services you should be getting now. With our recommendations, your health benefits are optimized based on you actual needs and usage, so your costs are reduced.
I think the best (and most popular) phrase I’ve seen to describe Cake Health is that it’s like Mint.com for healthcare. If you’ve never used Mint.com you should check it out (although, I’ve been considering switching to Wave since Mint was bought by Intuit). They figured out a simple way to get all your financial transactions into Mint and then provided some interesting aggregate information along with ways for you to save (that’s the Mint business model).
Obviously, Cake Health is still new, but you can see a lot of these same elements in their product offering. They have easy ways for you to import your claims data. Now we’ll see how well they can help you on figuring out ways to save on your healthcare expenses. That will be their biggest challenge. The easy part for them will be monetizing their users if they get enough of them.
Although, you can see the power of what they’ve created. In 48 hours after they launched, they had over $8M in claims imported. That’s a lot of interesting healthcare data. I’ll be interested to see in what ways they can leverage that data to improve healthcare.
John, Cake Health is an interesting business idea. However, is the average person likely to be more interested in managing medical billing/cost information than in managing his or her health information? If PHRs have not been a big hit, why would this? Just sayin’…
Jerome,
I think the answer is a possibly a little bit more, but not much. Part of it will depend on how well Cake Health can do at saving people money.
However, I still think their market might be more of the chronic patients as opposed to those that go in for a one time event.
Although, I was thinking that this service might be useful for something like a pregnancy (which there are a lot of those each year). I remember we kept getting bills left and right from my wife’s OB, the ultrasound people, the lab, the hospital, the anisthesiologist, the specialist my wife had to see for some potential complication, the cardiologist that checked the baby, the pediatrician, the respiratory person, etc etc etc. All from just having a baby. I’d be interested to see how well Cake Health would help with all those bills happening.