A mobile application to offer upfront healthcare prices and automated medical billing for socioeconomically disadvantaged Americans

Project Summary/Abstract This SBIR Phase II (R44) grant application will leverage publicly available healthcare service pricing data (i.e. emerging big data resources) to improve health information dissemination and utilization by minority health and disparity individuals, small businesses and communities. The long-term goal is to reduce health literacy barriers around the cost of healthcare and to simplify access to this information through an assisted mobile application and secure short message service (SMS) that helps minority and disparity populations get the care they need at a price they can afford. This will ultimately improve healthcare access and outcomes while reducing the burden of medical debt. Healthcare consumers today have limited information about the cost of a service until after it is rendered, despite there being significant variability in the price of the same service depending on location and provider. This makes it incredibly difficult for patients to make cost-informed choices about where to get healthcare or check the accuracy of medical bills, contributing to the $195bn of medical debt that Americans are burdened with. Minority health and disparity populations are disproportionately impacted by this, with Black Americans, Hispanic Americans and those below the federal poverty level (FPL) more likely to carry medical debt [1]. Soaring healthcare costs and the considerable impacts to minority health and disparity populations have resulted in significant legislative changes to enable healthcare price transparency through mandating public access to pricing data and shopping tools. The overall objective of this SBIR Phase II (R44) research proposal is to create a legislatively compliant healthcare service cost estimator and billing management mobile application, with bilingual and SMS capabilities to assist minority health and disparity populations in America find affordable healthcare and pay accurate medical bills. The technical feasibility of this solution has been validated in Phase I of the research, through preliminary development of a cost estimator and billing management application focused on prices of hospital services only. The proposed Phase II research will build on the preliminary findings and achieve the overall objective through four key aims: Aim 1: Assemble a national pricing database of healthcare services prices published by health plans, using cluster computing to enable high-volume data ingestion; Aim 2: Develop a multi-dimensional healthcare cost estimator for service quote building and approvals across multiple parties for Good Faith Estimates; Aim 3: Integrate a multi-language friendly content management system and HIPAA-compliant short message service (SMS) to support a bilingual (English and Spanish) application and ayschronous communication capabilities; Aim 4: Validate the usability of the advanced Cost Estimator and Billing Management Application (aCEBA) and its effectiveness in improving access and affordability of healthcare for socioeconomically disadvantaged populations.