Hey all! @Eugenewang15 and I founded HoneyInsured. After graduating in January, we discovered we needed health insurance (yea school for protecting us for 3.5 years!) and found insurance too confusing.
Walla, HoneyInsured, insurance recommendation engine! We thought it’d be interesting to use open data to build Hipmunk-like visualizations that let you compare options. We also use the data to automatically help you avoid common pitfalls during shopping. The goal is that you’ll be on, enrolled (with subsidies!), and off our site in 5 minutes :)
@graceggee 👊 I love seeing more innovation in healthcare. This looks good. Two questions:
1. How does it compare to other similar, established services like HealthSherpa? http://healthsherpa.com
2. When you expand to other states like CA, will you push customers out to their state-specific exchanges (again like HealthSherpa and others do) or will customers be able to stay in your flow?
@thetylerhayes@graceggee Hi Tyler, thanks so much for your compliments and 👊. It really means a lot to us :)
1. Coming from data science backgrounds, our main focus is on presenting and visualizing health insurance data so everyone (even insurance beginners) can make better coverage decisions. Although we also offer the same fast enrollment service like Healthsherpa, we’ll continue to innovate on the frontier of data! :D
2. For right now, we’re just starting out and are focused on states where integration is more straightforward (e.g. federal exchanges). If we go into CA, we'll make sure it's the same flow. Integration with CA will probably be more manual than tech, but we will certainly hope to expand to CA soon!
This super cool! I love the UI, particularly the screen that shows you what you'd pay in common scenarios—baby, bad flu, or stroke. That makes it really concrete for people what their insurance policy is doing for them.
There are a bunch of YC alums that worked on the healthcare.gov rescue team. The official site has to work, but we always knew most of the innovation would occur by developers outside the government.
Have you talked with anybody working on hc.gov? They might be able to help you, say, add eligibility for Medicaid, CHP eligibility, or any of the other half dozen programs we have to help people who can't afford healthcare on their own.
@bballinger Thanks so much for the feedback Brandon! You're nailing it, the common scenarios visual is the most-talked feature we've been getting! Ranking second is our compare plans visualization.
We’ve been in close contact with the developers hc.gov (yes, they’re getting better!). Being an authorized partner of hc.gov means we can enroll you (including tax subsidies) just as if you’re on hc.gov (except we make the enrollment faster and sleeker ;)). At this point, we are calculating whether you’re eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but we can’t process the Medicaid/CHIP enrollment since that is administrated through a separate department depending on your state.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, it is indeed quite exciting that some of the biggest jumps in UI/enrollment has been coming from outside of the government. It’ll be interesting to see how hc.gov reacts to these solutions. They recently made some updates http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/2... but some features as planned (e.g. doctor lookup) is still not ready. The best part I guess is that even though hc.gov has all the data, they make it free and open, which makes it nice for us developers to innovate!
@graceggee@bballinger If y'all haven't talked with the folks at Nava (http://navahq.com/) specifically, I'd recommend it—they're a group of people from the "tech surge" building a lot of the new technology for healthcare.gov. Happy to put you in touch if you'd like: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com
@bballinger They look awesome, we'll be in the Bay Area this weekend and would love to chat with them! My email is grace@honeyinsured.com. Thanks Brandon :)
HoneyInsured is a health insurance recommendation engine that can enroll you (including tax subsidies) in 5 min. You can compare all your insurance options in one beautiful chart and get your benefits explained in simple terms. The recommendation engine automatically helps you avoid pitfalls during insurance shopping so you know you're getting the best deal. They're currently available in 8 states (TX, GA, FL, VA, MO, OH, NC, PA) and are in the inaugural 2015 YC Fellowship batch.
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