MyMedicalShopper CEO heads to White House to aid health cost-comparison effort

Administration said to eye ‘big bold transparency initiative’

Mark Galvin, the CEO of Portsmouth-based MMS Analytics Inc., developer of MyMedicalShopper, a fast-growing medical cost comparison application that is closing in on million users, is scheduled to meet with top health officials in the White House Tuesday morning.

Galvin, who claims the spread of MyMedicalShopper will enable “the entire broken U.S. healthcare system to self heal,” said he is going to help the Trump administration with a transparency initiative that could save Medicare more than $100 billion.
Seacoast entrepreneur Mark Galvin meets Tuesday with two U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials at the White House.

 

Galvin, who first visited the White House on Oct. 3, said he was invited back by Katy Talento, a healthcare adviser to the White House policy team, who was trying to start a “big bold transparency initiative.” Galvin said “the secrecy about pricing must end,” and that the administration “didn’t care who we pissed off.”

Galvin has already met with with James Parker, senior advisor to the secretary of Health and Human Services and director of the Office of Health Reform. On Tuesday, he plans to meet with Randy Pate, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight and deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

Galvin, a serial entrepreneur, co-founded MMS in 2013 with the help of Matt Robinson, a recent computer science graduate from the University of New Hampshire. At first, the app was seen as a way to help those in the Granite State navigate the bewildering cost of medical procedures.

Armed with a CD-ROM of states’ claims data, the company developed an app that would tell you the average real cost of most medical procedures. Those costs can vary by more than a thousand percent.

Since then, the app’s features, and its reach, has mushroomed.

While some sign up for the full-service app on their own, most do so through their employer, which usually sets up a system to reward a shopper who uses the application to go to a lower-cost provider. Or the employer can use data analytics to figure out whether it would save money to offer a free blood test clinic at the workplace, rather than pay the expense of their employees going to a lab on their own to get the blood work for their annual physical.

Then last summer, the company took a quantum leap forward by penning a deal with Alegeus Technologies, a benefit account administrator serving some 225,000 employers, to offer the application through third-party administrators, brokers and the businesses they served. After going through a length security audit, MyMedicalShopper added some 600,000 users since March, increasing its subscriber base tenfold, Galvin said.

In addition, the deal now means the company now has expanded its access to more than 3 billion claims, making the company database truly national.

This should mean a huge revenue uptick, as the company generally charges about $100 for each subscriber, pocketing about $70, after each channel partner gets its take. It will also mean expanding the company’s workforce, which is currently at 14.

But more important, said Galvin, is that the company can fix the broken healthcare system by putting customers back into the loop. Comparison-shopping could drive down costs by 40 to 50 percent, he said.