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About Smart Medical ConsumerSmart Medical Consumer is the first intelligent web-based service for consumers to manage their medical expenses, with breakthrough features including automatic detection of medical billing mistakes. Smart Medical Consumer offers this application based on its patent pending technology and architecture. We develop proprietary web software, and also operate as the service provider. Analysis and management of the health care bills and insurance explanation of benefits might save a medical consumer thousands of dollars. Additionally, it can help a medical consumer smartly plan their short term and long term decisions for choices in health care, providers, drugs, health insurance plans, health savings accounts and flexible savings accounts. While health care providers and insurances use extensive resources and tools to optimize their revenues from services to consumers, there is hardly any help for consumers to optimize their medical spending. Smart Medical Consumer is dedicated to fill this void and offer services for consumers to smartly manage their health care expenses. The founder, Banu Ozden, PhD, is an expert in distributed database systems, multimedia systems, and Internet infrastructure. Formerly, she was at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey, as the Director of Research in Computing Systems, and at the Computer Science Department of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. After her own frustrations dealing with health care expenses, she founded Smart Medical Consumer to bring a consumer-centric solution to fellow medical consumers. Smart Medical Consumer currently offers the following services: MySMC beta service to manage medical expenses; MyDocs beta service to keep track of medical billing documents from healthcare providers, insurances, and health saving accounts; and Ask&Share service to get help from billing experts, and to share frustrations and experiences with a community of other smart medical consumers. Additional services and new features to the existing services are being developed, which will be available in 2008. Smart Medical Consumer can be contacted at contact@smartmedicalconsumer.com. The company is based in New York City and registered under SmartMC, LLC. Smart Medical Consumer's MissionSmart Medical Consumer is dedicated to helping people understand and manage their personal and family medical expenses. A patient encounters a good number of mistakes in health care bills, doctor invoices, hospital statements and insurance explanation of benefits. If detected, correcting these errors can save a medical consumer thousands of dollars.Some of these medical billing errors and health insurance plan coverage mistakes go undetected. Even when the medical consumer suspects errors in his medical bills or health insurance plan coverage, understanding and managing medical expenses can be so time consuming, quite often the patient just does not want to deal with his bills at all. As a result, either the patient pays his health care bills without thoroughly checking and ends up overpaying; or the patient does not pay his claimed patient responsibility and ends up with the collection agencies. Often, several health care providers, doctors, hospitals and multiple insurance plans are involved in a patient's healthcare. The medical consumer ends up juggling health care bills from different doctors, statements from multiple providers and explanation of benefits from a number of insurance plans. The multiplicity of players increases the origins for possible mistakes and complicates understanding and managing medical expenses for patients. Besides correcting mistakes, being a smart medical consumer is becoming more important in the current environment, where employee-based health care benefits are shrinking and health insurance plans are shifting more costs to consumers. The trend is increasing towards health saving accounts, flexible saving accounts and less comprehensive insurance coverage. Managing health saving accounts and flexible saving accounts, and making decisions for treatments, doctors, drugs, hospitals and insurance plans will involve more and more understanding of the short term and long term financial implications of the medical choices. Both healthcare providers and insurance companies use tools and experts to optimize their revenues from consumers' medical services. For consumers, there is hardly any help to optimize their medical spending. Smart Medical Consumer aims to empower the consumer for dealing with their healthcare finances. About MySMCSmart Medical Consumer's MySMC service is for managing user's medical expenses. MySMC is not a passive record tracking system, but it smartly analyses data to detect billing and coverage errors. It warns the user with detected billing mistakes, insurance coverage anomalies, and incorrectly allocated user payments. MySMC also enables user to analyze her own data more effectively, so that the user can make decisions about her medical choices and healthcare spendings.Smart Medical Consumer's first test users have saved thousands of dollars by the help of MySMC. Furthermore, the thorough understanding of what they are charged for and the correct amount they are responsible for have helped them to make proactive decisions about their medical choices. About MyDocsSmart Medical Consumer's MyDocs service is to keep track of records user receives from insurances, providers and saving accounts.MyDocs serves multiple purposes. One to maintain the records available to user as is so that the user does not need to manage filing of these records. Second to automatically retrieve data from the online documents stored in MyDocs and automatically enter data MySMC for further analysis. MyDocs can be also be used independent of MySMC if the user needs only easy filing, retrieving and note keeping for the records the user receives from healthcare providers, insurances and saving accounts. Similarly, the user can choose to use MySMC service independently of the MyDocs service. About Ask&ShareSmart Medical Consumer's Ask and Share is to help consumers understand their medical expenses: if you have questions regarding your medical expenses, doctor bills, health care provider statements, insurance claims, or explanation of benefits, post them here. Our moderators are medical billing experts and will answer your questions if they can. If not, other fellow smart medical consumers may be able to help.Not understanding your medical bills or insurance explanation of benefits might cause you to spend more on health care than your fair share. Whether you are questioning the copays for your prescription drug, disputing an insurance claim, managing your family's health care, trying to coordinate multiple insurance plans, trying to figure out the copay, coinsurance, allowed amount, reasonable and customary amount, hospital surcharge, deductible, out-of pocket amount, the services patient is charged for, the medical codes for services and procedures, and the diagnosis codes, or simply trying to understand the financial implications of the actions of your doctor or insurance company and what your options are, get aid from Smart Medical Consumer's billing experts. Whatever health problem you or your loved ones are going through, whether it is a catastrophic illness like cancer, a chronic disease like diabetes, or a sports injury like a hip fracture, don't let the patient responsibility of medical expenses pile up unfairly. Post your questions at Ask&Share, use Smart Medical Consumer's MySMC service to manage your expenses, and MyDocs service for easy filing and retrieving statements from providers, insurances and saving accounts. Advertising on SmartMedicalConsumerIf you are interested in advertising on smartmedicalconsumer.com, please email us at "advertising at smartmedicalconsumer dot com". |
