INNOVATION – ON YOUR DEVICE
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Healthation, which employs 50 at its headquarters and 35 in California and elsewhere outside of Illinois, has won contracts to bill for insurance premiums for two state health insurance exchanges and to provide the core administrative system for another state’s Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan, or CO-OP, a new type of nonprofit health insurer. Illinois has not yet set up a health exchange, which is designed to enable individual consumers to shop for health insurance policies.
“The market has been percolating, and now it’s going to boil,” Kornhauser said.
Kornhauser said he is disappointed that Illinois, despite having received $39 million in federal grants to study and start building its own health insurance exchange, hadn’t moved forward more quickly.
The non-profit Erie Family Health Center, which operates 11 clinics on Chicago’s West and Northwest sides to provide preventive health care to low-income people, is using federal money from the health-reform law to open its first suburban clinics — in Evanston later this year and in Waukegan in 2014.
The center will hire eight physicians, three dentists and two behavioral health therapists to staff those two clinics, which are expected to see 5,500 patients each annually. The 11 existing clinics serve a total of 37,500 people annually. The center also will unveil a patient web portal by early 2013. The portal, to be available in English and Spanish, will let patients access parts of their medical information from the electronic medical records; request appointments and medicine refills, and exchange messages with their doctor.
Elliot Richardson, president of the Small Business Advisory Council comprising 540 companies throughout Illinois, said such technology is key to cutting health-care costs and stabilizing health insurance rates. The council and other groups aim to create a CO-OP to provide less costly coverage than for-profit insurance companies.
“Creating efficient links between [health-care] providers and ensuring that the information is conveyed in a useful manner are part and parcel to bringing down costs,” Richardson said.