Insurtech start-up Oscar plans one-stop shop for health records
Health insurance start-up Oscar Health is working on a platform that can host all healthcare data for patients regardless of location or provider. The platform will provide patients’ entire medical history for member doctors, pulling the information from the start-up's claims records and other available data. The platform will use machine learning to discern what information is the most relevant, and will provide costings for potential treatments. All data will be provided on a consented basis.
Oscar Health CEO Mario Schlosser Oscar Health

Oscar Health, the $2.7 billion health-insurance startup, is joining the ranks of businesses trying to pull healthcare data into a single platform that might be accessible to doctors treating a patient.

Electronic health records allow doctors to get some information about your medical history. But they don't get it all — like information from an emergency room visit in another state, or notes from telemedicine appointments.

Some of that data can be important, but it's not easy to gather.

As an insurer, Oscar is in a place to pull that information together, because it manages health insurance claims. That puts all of a patient's medical history in one place, no matter the source, Oscar's chief technology officer Alan Warren told Business Insider.

Oscar isn't the only one to build one of these platforms. Google Health had a product that tried to do this, and Health IT giant Epic Systems operates a service called MyChart that helps patients see their information and communicate with doctors. There are also services that will store your personal health information though these are mainly managed by patients instead of doctors.

Warren, who joined the startup in 2016, previously worked at Google and led the engineering team for the Health product there. Google Health had built a personal health information service, but the project was shut down in 2011.

Here's how it works

If you're an Oscar member (which, in 2017, Oscar had about 105,000 people enroll in its health plans), your doctor will have access to the Clinical Dashboard.

The dashboard pulls from Oscar's claims records and other data that Oscar collects about the patients' medical history to give the doctor more context on a person's health than what they might learn with their electronic health record alone. From there, Oscar plans to use machine learning to pull up the most relevant information out of all those records. Plus, because this is attached to an insurer, the doctor will also get to look in and see how much a particular treatment might cost the patient.

Here's what it'll look like:

Oscar Health

This is just the first phase, Warren said. For now, the team will be making sure the information that makes its way in front of the doctor is actually useful, especially in cases where patients have a complex medical history. And there will be some data that won't be available. Any information that needs explicit consent before sharing, such as genetic information, won't be bundled into the dashboard.

To start, the Clinical Dashboard will only be available to Oscar's team of virtual doctors and those at the Oscar Center in Brooklyn. Eventually, the hope is to roll it out to all of Oscar's in-network providers.