Eligible streamlining the health care eligibility process

Multiple healthcare apps made presentations today at Y Combinator’s Demo Day as entrepreneurs seek use technology to streamline the massive, expensive, and inefficient health care industry.

Of this class, four companies have health-related products, although only two have announced themselves publicly yet.

Eligible is an API that makes it easier for the medical practitioners and insurance companies to assess patient eligibility.

As it stands, figuring out eligibility is a time-consuming, complicated process that sucks time and money. It is an offline process of paperwork and phone calls that can cost between $3 and $4 per claim. Furthermore, people on all ends of the health care system deal with eligibility questions — with more than 10 billion eligibility queries in last year alone.

This technology makes it easier to process questions regarding patients active vs. inactive status, coinsurance, copayment, deductible, health spending balance, and specific information like MRIs and diagnostics. It eliminates a lot of the back-and-forth and confusion on what care patients are eligible for. The API takes care of the complicated, technical elements on the backend so medical and insurance providers only need to handle the interaction with patients.

The company currently works with over 700 insurance companies and earns money from both developers and and insurance companies who use their code.

Another health company, Healthy Labs, provides a social network for people with chronic conditions. Read more on VentureBeat.

For the other two, you will just have to wait until they are ready to launch.