The business of healthcare and health insurance is mean. If you want to survive in this industry, you have to be scrappy and practice grit on a daily basis. The players within the market can be tough and inflexible. In 2014, we first demonstrated the prototype of MyMedicalShopper, alongside our campy mascot, “Dr. Hoot. Dr. Hoot had pure intentions. The doctor of cost-containment looked to solve the significant healthcare cost problem crippling businesses and American healthcare consumers by providing price transparency on an easy-to-use platform. Along the way, Dr. Hoot had taken some serious blows. From over-priced providers looking to gouge their patients with egregiously inflated medical bills, to health insurance carriers concealing the prices healthcare consumers so desperately needed, to even some well-intentioned employee benefits brokers who may not have known better, Dr. Hoot had been pushed against the ropes. It was time for Dr. Hoot to get aggressive.
Almost seven years after Dr. Hoot’s entrance into the healthcare & health insurance marketplace, an evolution has occurred, and Talon has been hatched. Like Steve Rodgers transforming into Captain America, Talon aims to combine radical price transparency with engaged, empowered healthcare consumerism to drive out waste in the health care delivery system.
This rebrand is a paradigm shift. Talon brings forth a new model and process to group healthcare cost-containment. Talon will fight on behalf of the healthcare consumer and look to ensure, in every way possible, that low-cost, high-quality care is identified and navigated to. We will uncover all instances of wasteful spending within a group’s healthcare expenditure and eliminate them through informing and incentivizing healthcare consumers. With an intuitive, behavioral-driven rewards program, we will equip employers with a custom system for managing and containing healthcare costs.
Talon is not just a price transparency platform. Talon is a rewards platform that positively impacts human behavior—driving sensible choices. And Talon is also a decision support tool that helps employees understand the impact of one health care plan versus another one on their wallets and their access to care.
For Talon, the future has never looked brighter. An unprecedented treasure trove of data will be freed up because of our work, in concert with the federal government, to make the Hospital Transparency rule, in effect beginning January 1st, 2021, and the Transparency in Coverage rule, expected January 1st, 2022, meaningful. We will now leverage this additional pricing data to minimize waste and maximize value, in partnership with businesses across the nation.
Are you ready to harness the power of data to transform the health and wealth of your employees? We’re ready to help.
