Tech Startups See Opportunity in New Health-Care Law
In the coming months, the Affordable Care Act will produce millions of newly insured Americans, many of whom will be making decisions about health care for the first time. A host of software startups plans to court the newly insured with slick online tools geared toward simple management of personal health.
“We’ve spent the last six years of our lives preparing for this,” says Cyrus Massoumi, who co-founded ZocDoc Inc., a Yelp-like search engine for physicians, in 2007. “We’re going to have a spike.”
Beyond counting on the program to supply new demand, many of these companies have borrowed designs and functions from social-networking and consumer apps. For example, online services from Audax Health Inc. encourage consumers to win cash rewards from insurance providers as they improve their health with diet and exercise and collect Foursquare-style badges to prove it.