Getting a handle on health insurance data: Podcast with Vericred CEO Mike Levin
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A huge ecosystem of technology companies has sprung up with tools to shop for health insurance, search drug coverage, administer HR and benefit plans, make physician appointments and more. They all need accurate, accessible, and detailed data on topics such as health plan design and rates, provider network participation and drug formularies in order to succeed. It's remarkably difficult and expensive to obtain and maintain the data, and this has created an opportunity for a specialized company --Vericred-- to perform the function as a utility for the whole industry.I'm excited by the opportunity and recently joined the board of Vericred to help guide the company's growth. In this podcast, I interview founder and CEO Mike Levin about the market and how Vericred is addressing it.Overview:
- (0:15) What are some of the key data challenges in the health insurance market?
- (1:53) Why are these problems so tough? Don't other industries have similar issues?
- (6:23) So what's the problem? With consumerization you have all these new players springing up and health plans just need to work with them, right?
- (7:40) What are the typical approaches to addressing these problems? Are the problems being solved?
- (9:16) You talk about "liberating" the data. Doesn't that scare health plans?
- (11:11) What does Vericred do to address these issues? Are you gaining traction?
- (15:03) Who are your customers?
- (17:10) Are there analogs in other industries or this is a unique beast for healthcare?
- (18:13) What changed with the passage of Obamacare and emergence of the marketplaces? And what is the impact of recent actions to undermine Obamacare?
- (20:23) How did you get involved with founding the company? How did it go from concept to implementation?
- (22:44) What changes do you expect in 2018? How is the company evolving to keep pace?
By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.