MedoSync were delighted to recently emerge as the winner of the health insurance payments challenge in the GKV:Impulse accelerator in Hamburg, Germany. The accelerator was run by Public.io on behalf of Bitmarck, a major technology firm servicing the needs of social insurers and Siemens BK, one of the largest employee statutory insurers in Germany. Our challenge was focused on the issue of patient co-payments which affects every citizen in Germany. Winning was a lovely surprise for a company based in Dublin, but as the dust has settled, we wanted to share our insights on some of the factors that we believe contributed to our success.

1. Problem first

Einstein is quoted as having said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” The accelerator was run over a period of months, packed with great learning opportunities but we spent the majority of this time trying to deeply understand the problem itself. In fact, we only started thinking about the solution in the last few weeks of the challenge. This approach is baked into the DNA of our company given that we spent the first 12 months understanding the challenges of healthcare revenue cycle management before we even started prototyping. The catalyst for our solution was the question, where does the data start?

2. Where does the data start?

Similarly to Ireland, German insurers need clean claims data. The further you move from the data source, the greater the chance that errors will creep in making the data less useful. The episode of care is the source of clean healthcare claims data and this means it is critical to work with providers to help them liberate the value. Clean data leads to new insights that can improve members’ lives. Healthcare should be about helping people live healthy lives and clean data in machine-readable format will be critical if insurers wish to create preventative programs for their members improving health while driving down costs.

3. Protecting data

Germany has led the way in Europe in protecting citizens’ data and healthcare data is a prime example of this. GDPR is a legal framework to guide companies in data protection and we believe that healthcare data needs to be closely protected. MedoSync is proud to have dual ISO accreditation in data security and data privacy and our software is hosted in Microsoft Azure which is HIPAA compliant. During the accelerator, we learned that it is expected that data does not move outside of Germany, and by designing our platform in a cloud-agnostic way we plan to use German-based cloud providers to meet this standard.  

We were delighted to take part in the accelerator and we were struck by how welcoming and warm our German hosts were. It was a welcome change of focus as we grow the business in Ireland and beyond. Although each healthcare system has its own challenges, all of them are at different stages on the road to digitising operations and we are happy to find that there is a product fit for MedoSync in one of the biggest healthcare markets in the world.  

Hospitals are losing 6-9% of their revenue due to leakages in the billing process. MedoSync stops these leakages by creating the invoice in real time and ensures hospitals get paid in full.

I am taking more time for reflection and writing up posts related to MedoSync’s areas of expertise: medical billing, healthcare, technology, and being a start-up in that ecosystem.

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