{"id":115,"date":"2015-04-24T23:29:25","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T23:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/?p=115"},"modified":"2015-04-24T23:29:25","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T23:29:25","slug":"oscar-the-1-5b-startup-making-health-insurance-suck-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/?p=115","title":{"rendered":"OSCAR: THE $1.5B STARTUP MAKING HEALTH INSURANCE SUCK LESS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Overview of a disruptive new entrant to the health insurance sector, fully consolidating the service and value chain with technology.<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/www.wired.com\/2015\/04\/oscar-funding\/<\/p>\n<header id=\"post-header\" class=\"no-art mob-marg-t-med marg-t-50 clearfix site-container\" data-js=\"postHeader\">\n<ul class=\"center metadata marg-b-25\">\n<li class=\"byline marg-r-sm inline-block mob-marg-b-sm\"><span class=\"link-underline-sm marg-r-sm\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/author\/ilapowsky\/\" rel=\"author\">ISSIE LAPOWSKY<\/a><\/span> BUSINESS \u00a0<time>04.20.15 \u00a0<\/time><time>2:08 PM<\/time><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1 id=\"post-title\">THIS $1.5B STARTUP IS MAKING HEALTH INSURANCE SUCK LESS<\/h1>\n<\/header>\n<section class=\"post-container site-container clearfix relative\" data-js=\"post\">\n<div id=\"start-of-content\" class=\"content link-underline relative\" data-js=\"content\">\n<p><span class=\"lede\">IN LESS THAN <\/span>two years, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hioscar.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Oscar Health<\/a>, a New York City-based health insurance company, has already amassed 40,000 members, with its member-friendly plans and tech-driven approach. Now, the startup has landed another $145 million round of funding at a $1.5 billion valuation, which will help bring Oscar insurance to other cities across the country by the end of the year.<\/p>\n<p>While $1 billion-plus valuations are commonplace in the tech world these days, Oscar is one of a handful of startups that seems to have truly earned it. Oscar, which launched back in 2013, took on one of the country\u2019s most entrenched and hairy markets\u2014health insurance\u2014and infused it with technology and user-friendly design. Now it\u2019s generating around $200 million a year in revenue, according to CEO and co-founder Mario Schlosser. And that\u2019s only in its existing markets in New York and New Jersey.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, Oscar has set a high bar for other insurance companies, offering members a slew of perks like free televisits, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/2014\/12\/oscar-misfit\/\" target=\"_blank\">free fitness trackers<\/a>, free checkups, and cash incentives for getting a flu shot. Now, insurance companies in other markets are beginning to follow Oscar\u2019s lead, meaning the challenge ahead for the Oscar team will be to expand faster than their competitors can rip them off. In an industry like health insurance, where the healthcare landscape can change drastically from state to state, that doesn\u2019t happen overnight.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe don\u2019t just go into a new geography and put a bunch of banners on the walls,\u201d Schlosser says. \u201cIt makes the barriers to entry for anyone attempting this quite daunting, but the good thing for us is, for at least parts of this process, we have the technology to handle it.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Tying It All Together<\/h3>\n<p>Oscar\u2019s founding team initially set out to apply a design-thinking approach to health insurance, which meant improving the user experience for a product that is notoriously user-unfriendly. While the team feels it accomplished its initial goal, they realized that fixing health insurance would take more than cosmetic work. To get there, the Oscar team has built multiple tools of the variety that have become popular in health tech recently, including doctor and drug searches, telemedicine, and fitness tracking. More importantly, however, Oscar\u2019s tools talk to each other, ensuring the information doesn\u2019t get stuck in silos across companies.<\/p>\n<p>Oscar also partners directly with physicians to help them better understand their patients. For instance, Oscar may soon give hospital planners access to data on whether or not patients fill their prescriptions or visit urgent care centers after a hospital stay.<\/p>\n<p>According to Schlosser, it\u2019s this holistic approach to technology that will be the company\u2019s competitive advantage as it scales. \u201cJust fixing the user experience won\u2019t be enough,\u201d he says. \u201cWe went to great lengths to create an incredibly close relationship between our technology and physicians.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Already, Oscar is seeing some promising results from this work. One particularly impressive statistic is the fact that some 60 percent of Oscar members who have bronchitis have used the telemedicine feature to diagnose it and get treatment, according to t he company. Of those cases, 93 percent get resolved over the phone with no need for a follow up visit. \u201cWe feel that it\u2019s a nice win-win-win situation,\u201d Schlosser says. \u201cThe physician can deliver care in an efficient way. The member loves it because it\u2019s convenient, and frankly, we like it, because oftentimes, those conditions could become worse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But while a $1.5 billion valuation may be huge for a two-year-old startup, it\u2019s important to remember that\u2019s pocket change compared to, say, UnitedHealth Group\u2019s $114 billion market cap or even Aetna\u2019s $37.75 billion value. If Oscar\u2019s seemingly overnight success in one of the country\u2019s most competitive cities for health insurance is any indication, it\u2019s clear the company still has lots of room to grow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Overview of a disruptive new entrant to the health insurance sector, fully consolidating the service and value chain with technology. http:\/\/www.wired.com\/2015\/04\/oscar-funding\/ ISSIE LAPOWSKY BUSINESS \u00a004.20.15 \u00a02:08 PM THIS $1.5B STARTUP IS MAKING HEALTH INSURANCE SUCK LESS IN LESS THAN two years, Oscar Health, a New York City-based health insurance company, has already amassed 40,000 members, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/?p=115\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">OSCAR: THE $1.5B STARTUP MAKING HEALTH INSURANCE SUCK LESS<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leadership","category-reference"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ef.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}