Seattle-based Goodbill Receives $3.4M to Tackle Medical Billing
What could be the nightmare for people struggling with mounting medical bills in today’s disease-stricken world? The problem becomes complicated by complicated, opaque, and hidden costs, making patients and their families suffer. Goodbill, the Seattle-based medical bill startup, serves as a light in the darkest pit in the healthcare ecosystem by streamlining, easing, understandable, and transparent medical bills.
Founded by Patrick Haig and Ian Sefferman, Goodwill was set up last year to offer an authentic solution to understand the underlying meanings of increasing medical bills while helping people stay upfront in unearthing the disputing billing errors. To streamline the services, the duo launched a more straightforward service.
According to the new updates, private insurers have been required by the US Govt to include the expenses of up to eight COVID-19 rapid tests per subscriber per month. Even Goodwill's founders could play a role in managing the mandated coverage.
Haig said, “The company knows that submitting claims to the insurer is never really that easy or enjoyable,” Therefore, they have launched a free tool that makes it easy for users to recover the costs for the Tester kits. The team had been building tool components for their bigger mission while helping consumers elevate the startup’s profile in the near term. As a result, hundreds of people have used the site to submit their claims. The company has attracted the attention of the venture capital community to raise $3.4 million in December 2021.
Founders’ Co-op raising money from Maveron and Liquid 2 Ventures led the seed round that includes Goodbill angel investors include Christian Sutherland-Wong, CEO of Glassdoor; Dan Yoo, former chief operations officer of Nerdwallet; David Hahn, former chief product officer of Instacart; Dr. Aasim Saeen, CEO of Amenity. Health; Greg Rudin of Menlo Ventures; and Nick Soman, CEO of Decent.
Anarghya Vardhana, a partner in Maveron, shared a personal story via Twitter to narrate her version.
“After a 6-figure bill sticker shock post-delivery of my daughter in the spring of 2020, I was in search to find a company that could, at scale, prevent this from happening to anyone else,” Vardhana tweeted.
Currently, the company’s products for disputing medical bills are available in North Carolina in the spring. The platform will therefore offer a free, automated review of hospital bills with estimated errors along with a detailed inspection in comparison with a patient’s digital medical records to discover mistakes.
If consumers want a detailed process, they can take advantage of a billing coder that reviews the charges, and Goodbill will send records and faxes to hospitals to check teams to dispute the bills. The startup helps negotiate a corrected, final bill and charges patients with a small percentage of any savings they realize. The new service helps automate the initial bill reviews through a communicative platform to complete the billing services efficiently.
Haig further added that it is the perfect time to launch such services as healthcare pricing data is revealed publicly, and people can access all the digital patient records.
The Future of Goodwill
Potentially, the company has a great future as it can be expanded into many regions over time while setting the global healthcare needs to the top priority. As per the survey conducted by Lending Tree, there is a surge of 37% of American natives to ease their medical bills and look for an effective tool to reduce their bills.
Haig and Sefferman aim to create additional tools to help make healthcare costs more convenient, transparent, and shareable to different hospitals and healthcare systems. They are further thinking of creating a website like Glassdoor, where current and former employees post anonymous company reviews and share salary information.