The service transaction between a patient and physician has always been looked at closely from a billing perspective. Relatively few attempts have been made to enhance the match-making aspect of it: like which physician is best suited for the given patient? Tweaking this may have cascading effects downstream in the service experience and actual outcome.
Years ago, Zocdoc impressed me with their simple solution in this space. It was making it easier to get an appointment with retail physician of your choice. It’s hard to scale the retail small/medium clinics, so they dabbled in employee wellness for a bit and finally settled its focus on hospitals and health system customers.
Amino focuses on figuring out the right physician first and then help with cost-estimation and scheduling. It claims to have analyzed a trove of insurance claims data to figure out the attributes of past interactions of care providers. Using the information that patient’s type in to Amino website (health problem, insurance, zip code, etc.) it can align it with the best physician profile in its database.
The approach has merits since most patients are inherently biased (“my sister says this doctor is great”), lazy (“I’ve always gone to this nearby clinic”) or arbitrary (“I just googled it”, “His name was on the first page of my insurance directory”) in the way they select physicians. Having a good partner in healthcare can make a difference. My curiosity is about their business model – who pays for this ultimately? For now, Amino has enough runway to not worry about it ($20M in three rounds so far).
PS: Kyruus does similar stuff, but for enterprise.