Simplifying health insurance: Simplee.com helps manage your health care spending online

Lori Johnston

Tracking health care costs can be as difficult as trying to decipher a doctor’s handwriting.

Co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs can make it tough to get a handle on total expenses, taking into consideration all of your checkups, prescriptions, treatments, emergencies and major medical events.

A new free website – Simplee.com – aims to be a one-stop spot for people to keep an eye on their health care spending and possibly even save money. It is thought to be the first personal budgeting website just for health care, which is a major budget item for Americans. In September, Simplee.com introduced the ability for users to pay health care bills directly from the website with their debit or credit cards.

The Simplee.com dashboard gives an overview of your health care spending.

“What we tell our consumers is, ‘We understand why you avoid health care. Who wouldn’t? It’s so complex and frustrating,” says Tomer Shoval, co-founder and CEO of Simplee, based in Palo Alto, Calif. “What we’re going to do is, we’re going to make it easy and understandable for you.”

Since Simplee – an online service for managing personal health care expenses – debuted in June, it has added more than $75 million in health care expenditures and more than 100,000 physicians to its database. The company declined to provide user numbers.

How Simplee works

While people can log onto their insurers’ website to track health care spending, Simplee.com allows a user to look at several health care accounts, just like Mint.com brings together all financial accounts online.

Once someone signs up, his or her health care plan details, bills and claims instantly are linked to Simplee.com. Dental and vision plans also can be added.

As of September 2011, Simplee.com was available to users with these insurers: Aetna, Anthem, Blue Cross Blue Shield of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, CIGNA, Delta Dental, MetLife, UnitedHealthcare, Vision Service Plan (VSP) and WellPoint (Empire BCBS). These companies represent about 70 percent of the U.S. health insurance market, Shoval says.

There’s no financial relationship between Simplee.com and health insurance companies, according to Shoval.

To get started on Simplee.com, you need to:

• Create an online account with your health insurance company.

• Enter your health insurance company username and password so Simplee can retrieve the information.

• Link multiple accounts for family members to one Simplee account.

When you log in, a dashboard appears at the top of the page with:

• Your total health care costs.

• How much you have paid.

• Your annual health insurance deductible.

• The number of doctor’s visits.

• The number of transactions (including pharmacy purchases and lab tests).

“All of a sudden, you see your information in a way that is easy to consume,” Shoval says.

Claims for each family member are listed. A “Your Plan” section lists your deductibles, co-insurance percentages and out-of-pocket maximums, and breaks down all available services – from preventive options to maternity care – with coverage amounts.

Potential savings

One of Simplee.com’s benefits is that users could discover mistakes in health care bills. One couple using Simplee found that a $1,400 bill had been incorrectly noted as being from a lab that was outside their health insurance network. They received a refund for the difference between the out-of-network and in-network lab costs, Shoval says.

“The way for people to start saving money is first to understand how much they spend,” Shoval says.

Health care privacy concerns

But do potential savings come at the cost of online privacy?

One component of Simplee.com offers a financial breakdown of every visit to a health care provider.

Simplee.com voluntarily adheres to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards to assure data privacy and security. It doesn’t plan to share user information with anyone, Shoval says. “Users are coming to our site and trusting us. Their information is protected,” he says.

All of Simplee.com’s data is encrypted. Simplee does not change anything in a patient’s insurance records or share information with an insurer. Still, privacy concerns may outweigh the convenience of Simplee.com, consumer and privacy advocates say.

“As we’ve seen over the past years, nobody is immune from the possibility of hacking or a data breach,” says Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a San Diego-based nonprofit education and advocacy organization.

“Every time you have another organization that has your personal information, you’re multiplying the opportunities for that information to be breached through hacking or otherwise. You need to consider how important it is to you as a patient to keep this information confidential.”

Health care information is particularly prone to data breaches, says Brian Lapidus, chief operating officer for the fraud solutions division of Kroll Fraud Solutions, a Nashville, Tenn.-based provider of data protection and identity theft services.

A 2010 study commissioned by Kroll found that 19 percent of hospitals reported data breaches in 2009, up from 13 percent in 2008. Since 2003, more than eight of every 10 data breaches were “low tech” scenarios including improper disposal of documents, lost or stolen laptops, and stolen backup tapes, according to DataLossDB.org.

Simplee.com says users have the right to hold it accountable for the privacy and security commitments made in its terms of service.

How to protect yourself

People who plan to use Simplee.com or another website should take these steps to protect their personal information, Stephens and Lapidus say:

• Read the terms of use and the privacy policy. See whether the site plans to sell your information to third parties — something that Simplee.com says it doesn’t plan to do.

• Find out where the data is stored. Health information stored in the United States has more protections compared with health information stored in other countries; Simplee.com hosts its online services in the United States.

• Use a different password. A data breach on one site could give an identity thief access to other accounts that have the same password.

• Make sure you’re not violating your insurer’s terms and conditions by providing a user name and password to Simplee.com or another site.