2015 Portland Company of the Year: Healthsparq

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

GoLocalPDX Business Team

The best companies accomplish two things: they generate plenty of profit and they provide a necessary and useful service to its customers and the community at large.

Portland’s Healthsparq reaches and surpasses both of those goals, helping to earn them the title of GoLocalPDX's Portland company of the year. The company has struck a perfect balance between providing helpful and important tools to healthcare customers while becoming one of the most profitable young companies in the city.

Healthsparq has shown tremendous growth recently, rolling out new services in the past few months while being named Portland’s third-fastest growing business, growing 1,146 percent over the last three years, according to the Portland Business Journal.

Torben Nielsen, senior Vice President of product and strategy at Healthsparq, told GoLocal that 2015 was a particularly strong year for the company.

“HealthSparq had a standout year in 2015 -- we saw a 67 percent increase in revenue, a 47 percent increase in visits to our tools, and a 33 percent increase in searches through our health care comparison shopping tools,” Nielsen said. “This means that thousands of consumers have been empowered to comparison shop for their health care options based on cost and quality metrics, making personal health decisions with confidence that they understand what's available to them.”

Torben Nielsen

What Healthsparq Does

Healthsparq uses insurance claims data from participating health plans to help healthcare customers comparison shop between the prices of different medical procedures and health insurance plans. Now in it’s third year, the company was the first to provide patients with reviews, out-of-pocket cost information, treatment cost information, and information on treatment needed before and after medical procedures.

According to a study conducted Blue Research and sponsored by Healthsparq, roughly 40 percent of healthcare customers say their out of pocket increased over the past year. Meanwhile, a whopping 70 percent of respondents said the cost of medical treatment was more than they expected and 68 percent said it was wrong for doctors and hospitals to charge different amounts for the same procedure. Perhaps most notably, 25 percent said they would not have had the medical procedure at all and 41 percent would have postponed it.

"Today's health care system can feel fragmented and confusing for many patients, which is why it's our mission is to rewire the way that people interact with this system in order to make better healthcare decisions,” Nielsen said. “People and health plans are responding to our approach.”

Nielsen said that Healthsparq hopes to empower consumers with more knowledge about the cost of healthcare in order for them to have an impact on the market by shopping for the best treatment at the best cost.

“Our core focus is to humanize health care and continue empowering consumers with tools that allow them to make the most informed healthcare decisions for themselves and their families,” Nielsen said. “That includes releasing new products and services that enhance the overall healthcare experience, creating new ways consumers have access to our tools, and creating a more connected system for patients, health plans and providers.”

What’s Ahead

In late October of 2016, Healthsparq began a new service, tailored to ensure health plans get accurate data needed from providers to achieve compliance and dramatically improve member experience.

Known as HealthSparq Clean, the data-as-a-service is designed to help health plans avoid significant fines from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), while giving members a directory they can trust.

The data would help healthcare companies to update their directories, which help patients find doctors who are in their network and accepting new patients, among other things Inaccurate directories can lead to patients ultimately shouldering a much higher portion of the cost of their care and health care providers can be fined as much as $25,000 for an individual inaccuracy found in a directory.

Healthsparq hopes that their new service will help providers save money by avoiding unnecessary fines while empowering consumers with accurate and up-to-date information.

“What CMS is asking of health plans isn’t easy. It’s going to take tremendous effort for them to meet these mandates, especially considering that some mandates have not been fully defined,” said Dan Medin, service products director for HealthSparq. “We’ve designed this service to be as tailored and nuanced as possible so a health plan in California can meet both CMS and its own strict state guidelines, and a health plan in New York can do the same, all without having to redesign their directories or create a custom solution.”

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