Castlight Health mobile app lets consumers use their smartphones to look up cost and quality information about their healthcare providers, an especially helpful tool for patients with high-deductible plans.

1. Mobile App Helps Consumers Shop
For Healthcare
For a lot of patients, just the thought of asking their doctor how much a
check-up, X-ray, or lab work costs can feel awkward. But a new mobile
app makes it easy for many patients to find that information without
confronting their doctors or their staff.
Castlight Health, which provides an online shopping platform for
healthcare, recently introduced a new mobile app that lets consumers use
their smartphones to access healthcare pricing and quality data about
their providers.

2. Castlight Mobile is available as a native application on Apple iOS and
Google Android devices, and is also accessible to Blackberry and other
smartphone users via an optimized mobile Web offering. The application
is free to all employees of Castlight's employer customers.
Those customers include Regis Corp., which operates 8,000 corporate-
owned hair salons, including Supercuts, nationwide. Regis in March
rolled out Castlight, which employs 50,000 workers in the
U.S., including 17,000 full-time employees who are eligible for health
benefits.

3. Most of Regis Corp.'s health plans from Aetna have high
deductibles, ranging from $2,500 to $5,000, while the average Regis
employee is 27 years old and female, said Allison Brown, Regis' director
of employee services.
Although many of those employees work in salons, others are field
managers who often are on the road. "When someone has an illness or an
accident when they're away from home, panic sets in," said Brown.
The mobile app allows Regis' traveling employees to use their
smartphones to find providers in their health plan network who are
located near their hotel and "gives them cost information, and a map and
play-by-play directions to get there," she said. "It's been really helpful."

4. The mobile app is also convenient for employees in other
industries, including field salespeople, grocery clerks, truckers, and
manufacturing workers, who are often on the road or don't have desk
jobs providing easy access to computers or the Web, said Ethan
Prater, VP of products at Castlight, a venture-backed company whose
investors include the Cleveland Clinic and Morgan Stanley Investment
Management.
Castlight has an interesting family tree. The San Francisco-based
company was co-founded in 2008 by CEO Dr. Giovanni Colella, who
also co-founded RelayHealth, which was acquired by McKesson.
Castlight's other co-founder was Todd Park, former chief technology
officer of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, who was
recently named CTO of the U.S., replacing the nation's first
CTO, Aneesh Chopra.

5. The "secret sauce" of Castlight's offering is the company's "data
sources," including employer healthcare claims, data about negotiated
rates, and quality data from centers of excellence, on which Castlight
applies algorithms to calculate cost and quality information about
providers, said Prater. The company provides its services to self-insured
employers, including companies in the retail, manufacturing and
financial services industries, who often offer employees high-deductible
health plan choices, he said.
This "healthcare transparency" is delivered to Castlight's client's
employees via a Web-based portal that allows consumers to shop for
healthcare and make their choices based on quality ratings of healthcare
providers in their networks, as well as cost information, such as out-of-
pocket expenses.

6. For many Castlight clients such as Regis, the service replaces
stodgy, static books that were mailed to employees annually to inform
them about providers in their health plan networks. But even that
information didn't contain price data, said Brown.
"When people go into their doctor's office for a routine annual check-
up, there are often services, like tests that show up as itemized costs on
their bills later, and some of those things aren't covered," said Brown.
The Castlight service allows Regis employees to check out this cost
information for tracking their out-of-pocket expenses before making an
appointment. The mobile app can help Regis workers find healthcare
info on the fly when they're ill and looking for care from providers who
might include nearby retail or workplace clinics.
"The information is easy to find and easy to use for a lay people," she
said.

7. Regis is in the midst of rolling out wireless networks in its salons
nationwide so employees can have easier access to this health
information from work, she said.
Some Regis employees already have been saving out-of-pocket costs by
using Castlight's services, Brown said. That includes one employee
whose doctor billed her a higher fee than what was listed for that doctor
on the Castlight portal. The employee successfully requested a fee
correction from the doctor's office, she said.
Castlight is helping Regis employees be more educated healthcare
consumers by filling an information gap, Brown said.
"Doctors often can't talk about price," she said. And at the same
time, "there's something about doctors' white coats that have patients
saying yes to everything," she said.

8. The Orra Health team believes that this trend will redefine the concept
of doctor consultation, knowledge of healthcare pricing and a sound
competition for better services. However, the apps and the associated
back-ends need to be structurally strong and functionally robust to
prevent the users and the healthcare fraternity by large from any
eventualities.