Another healthcare shopping effort
While out exploring the land of Twitter, I stumbled across a new effort to deliver online healthcare shopping to consumers. HealthShoppr looks to still be in start-up mode, but we can add it to the list of efforts to empower healthcare consumers with more ways to choose their care. In this market we’ve already seen Carol.com and Med Care Compare, both of which are much further along, as well as CreateHealth, an initiative started by Robert Stevens, CEO of Ridgeview Medical Center in Waconia, that is still in development stage. (And of course, there’s the business plan my MBA team put together for a company called Third Opinion, that is in the “collecting dust on the shelf” stage). It will be fun to see how these efforts fare in the coming year.
On a side note, the CEO of HealthShoppr, Vijay Goel, M.D., has what looks like a great blog, Consumer-focused Health Care. Check it out…
Thanks for the mention of HealthShoppr.
We’re going live in early December and a bit different than the others mentioned in that we’re selling/ booking services on a cash basis with individual wellness practitioners (we’re starting in massage therapy and personal training).
We’re allowing you to find better, more personalized service options that don’t tend to work so well in the insurance/claims world. Hope you’ll take a look as we go live…our starting point however (as with all new things in wellness) is Southern CA.
Seems the focus on more retail-oriented services such as those mentioned would make this offering more intuitive for consumers. As we’ve seen with Carol.com’s struggles, folks aren’t used to shopping for more traditional healthcare. All in all, the more of these initiatives we see, the more likely the sector will grab hold with consumers and start having an impact on the market. Which, in our eyes, would be a great thing.