Healthcare consumers wading through the myriad of preferred provider organizations have a new tool at their disposal to determine which PPO fits their needs.
Ecom PPO Advisors, LLC, is launching Origin, a Web-based application designed to comb through managed care networks and the patient’s own data to determine the best PPO network.
According to Rachel Graham, Ecom’s president and chief operating officer, and Michael Newman, the company’s director of systems engineering, Origin allows insurance salespeople or brokers to scan Ecom’s database at the point of sale, helping subscribers determine which PPO networks include their hospitals and primary care physicians and reducing out-of-network claims.
“Origin is a unique solution to the PPO selection process and is a significant, positive change to the standard enrollment process,” said Graham in a May press release unveiling Origin, which is now being beta-tested. “Origin protects the member/provider relationship and offers an optimized PPO solution to the payer that is currently not available in today’s evolving healthcare market.”
Graham said the typical agent or broker may have quick access to one PPO or managed care organization and could go online to research other groups. This “takes things a step further,” she said, by putting all that data within easy reach.
Newman said the next phase of the project will be to include an extra layer of decision support to help agents and patients compare PPOs and choose the right one. “We want to provide statistical information where you could break ties,” he said.
A subsidiary of iHealth Technologies, Ecom was launched in 1998 and provides healthcare cost containment services to more than 70 payers and healthcare providers.