Goodbill, a startup working to reduce medical costs to patients and a subset of insurers, has raised $2 million in new capital and expanded its market.
The Seattle-based company is targeting errors in hospital bills, analyzing digital medical records that include doctors’ notes and scrutinizing medical claims to unearth and challenge mistakes in the charges.
Goodbill launched in 2021, helping individual patients review their hospital bills and providing a free tool to aid Americans seeking reimbursement for COVID-19 diagnostic tests from private insurance providers.
But the platform ultimately caught the attention of larger companies that opt to directly pay for the healthcare of their employees rather than purchasing health insurance plans over which they have less control — a practice called self-funding. Approximately 90 million Americans are covered by self-funded plans.
Goodbill’s initial approach inserted their analysis into the billing process after insurers had already paid their share, and the remaining costs were passed on to patients. But employers and administrators of the self-funded plans wanted the company to get involved upstream and tackle the charges being billed to them.
Goodbill, which operates nationwide, has expanded to serve these self-funded health plans, while also still providing services to individual patients.
“That’s a way to significantly get to scale,” said co-founder and CEO Patrick Haig.
The startup is working with several employers and health plan third-party administrators, currently covering a total of 50,000 people.
The new funding is anchored by Founders’ Co-op, Maveron and Liquid 2 Ventures, which invested in Goodbill’s initial $3.4 million round in December 2021. Some additional unnamed funds and angel investors joined the new investment.
The company’s services also include determining if a patient qualifies for financial assistance. Nonprofit hospitals are required to provide programs that discount or even waive bills for patients that meet certain income criteria, but the assistance can be difficult to find and apply to. Goodbill navigates that process.
The startup’s platform is compatible with major electronic health record vendors including Epic, Cerner, Meditec and others. Goodbill uses artificial intelligence to examine claims and medical records, and human reviewers verify the analysis.
Haig launched Goodbill with Ian Sefferman, the company’s chief technology officer. The duo previously teamed up to create MobileDevHQ, a startup that helped app users increase their reach, which was acquired in 2014 by Seattle’s Tune. They later created a startup studio in Detroit, Sefferman’s hometown. Haig has since returned to Seattle and they’re both focused on Goodbill.
While Goodbill can’t fix America’s approach to paying for healthcare — people in the U.S. owe roughly $220 billion in medical debt — Haig hopes their efforts can help “make a dent in the broken system.”
U.S. healthcare billing, he said, “is probably more Byzantine than most people really can appreciate.”
