Chethan Sarabu, MD — Co-Founder at OpenHand
Sep 17, 2024
We are so excited to tell you about a new service that we have been working on to help patients have more agency in their healthcare. The US Healthcare system is a complex patchwork of hospital networks and insurance companies that negotiate prices in an opaque process and patients are usually left with the short end of the stick. Thanks to new rules around price transparency, it turns out that healthcare costs can be all over the place, and there’s often room to negotiate. The problem is, patients haven’t had the tools or power to do that—until now. A combination of patient data transparency laws along with the power of AI can empower patients in this process, that is what OpenHand is all about.
Our origin story
This is a company created from our very own experiences. OpenHand co-founders have had long standing chronic medical conditions that have required frequent healthcare visits which lead to ever increasing bills. Chances are that you’ve received a medical bill with an error as the Medical Billing Advocates of America estimates that 80% of bills have errors.
After learning this, one of the founders decided to dig deeper into a recent hefty medical bill. They scraped together screenshots of the bill, along with detailed medical notes, and used AI tools like ChatGPT to help identify potential errors. While the process required a decent amount of time and effort to cross-check the information, the results were significant—they uncovered several costly errors. By writing a detailed letter explaining these discrepancies and presenting it to the doctor, they were able to reduce the bill by almost $400.
This experience made it clear that with the right tools and guidance, patients can take control of their bills—something we've made dead simple with OpenHand.
Trusting AI in healthcare
When it comes to AI in healthcare, the technology is still quite new but already has shown significant promise. There are still many open questions and ongoing work to make it more accurate and trustworthy. We use a secure trusted model and partner and send only the minimum required data from your bills to identify potential savings. We take your health data privacy very seriously.
What you can do right now
We welcome you and your loved ones to examine any unpaid medical bills and see if we can help identify potential savings. To get started visit openhand.health and sign up for our Early Access Program. The first 50 patients to sign up will receive free access to OpenHand for one year and a personal onboarding session with the founders.
We hope you don't need to pay expensive healthcare bills but if you do, OpenHand is here for you! We hope to create a fairer healthcare system for patients.
Sincerely,
The OpenHand Team