With Cure Pro, Healthcare Enters the AI Era

Cure Benefits
6 min readFeb 26, 2021

Last April, we introduced Cure, our platform for employers to manage their healthcare plans. Our product included a marketplace for patients to look up doctors and hospitals (hereafter known as “providers”) based on price, wait time, review ratings, distance, and any information they would need to decide on where to get care. We also introduced a revolutionary billing system, which allowed a provider to type in a patient’s 10-digit ID number or scan their QR code, type in a bill, and immediately have it sent to the patient’s phone. The patient can then verify that the bill was correct (we automatically simplified it for them) and choose “Accept” if the bill was correct and “Reject” otherwise. Upon acceptance, a provider would see their funds in their bank account within two days, a dramatic improvement from the 49-day industry average. Patients, too, saw a significant improvement in the healthcare consumer experience — they now had the ability to divide up their out-of-pocket expenses in up to 26 tax-free installments via payroll deduction and they no longer had to worry about deductibles and coinsurance (we replaced all confusing healthcare jargon pertaining to out-of-pocket expenses with how much “You Pay” and how much “We Pay”).

Finally, we integrated our platform with direct primary care, allowing patients have 24/7 access to their personal doctor via phone, text, and video and same- or next-day 30 minute to 1 hour in-person appointments. We added updates in July to allow doctors to be paid within 18 seconds, the ability to view prescription drugs offered by our partner ScriptSourcing on our marketplace, and automatic monthly bank transfers to direct primary care doctors.

Despite these new features, we faced one key roadblock — our platform was dependent on network effects. Cure offered no value for companies offering health insurance or their employees without a critical mass of doctors and hospitals, and it offered no value for doctors and hospitals so long as there was not a critical mass of employers. We quickly realized we had to go back to the drawing board to ameliorate this.

Fortunately, Cure Card, which we launched just two weeks ago, offered a solution to this dilemma. Given that most medical service providers (outside of China) accept credit or debit cards as legal tender for payment, we now had a way to upgrade our platform to offer employers access to almost any doctor or hospital across the world. Beyond integrating Cure Card with our original Cure platform, we just needed to find a way to discover what medical procedures were completed at the time of service.

Introducing Cure Pro

With that, we are beyond excited to announce Cure Pro! Cure Pro brings back everything we introduced with Cure while introducing Cure Card as a form of payment. As with standard Cure Card, patients can go to any doctor, hospital, pharmacy, or other medical establishment and pay for healthcare expenses with either a physical or virtual debit card. However, instead of having to pay back the full amount via tax-free installments, you will only have to pay whatever copay you owed for the medical treatment.

Remedy: A Revolution in Medical Billing

Example bill for the patient. Prices may vary between hospitals and doctors.

To calculate the total amount the patient owed for any given medical service or prescription drug, we created a revolutionary AI-powered billing system called Remedy. Given the place of service, name of the employee or dependent receiving medical care, and either the list of medical or pharmaceutical codes (United States) or names of treatments (outside the United States, although the most affordable American surgery centers and hospitals would fall under this as well), the prices for each service, and a picture of the medical bill, Remedy automatically finds all medical services and prices on the bill and simplifies the bill so that patients can understand them. What makes Remedy unique is that it can automatically link different names of treatments to each other. For example, if our database has “hip replacement” as a valid medical treatment, any bill with service “total hip arthroplasty” is changed to “hip replacement”. “Anterior cruciate ligament repair” is understood to have the same meaning as “ACL reconstruction”, “arm lift” will automatically be linked to “brachioplasty”, etc. In short, Remedy understands medical terminology better than even the world’s brightest medical researchers, allowing for medical or pharmaceutical bills from anywhere across the globe to be processed in under a minute.

Upon viewing the simplified bill on their phone, patients can choose to press “Continue” if everything is correct or “Back” if it is not. By providing the “Back” option, patients can use Remedy to simplify any medical bill they have to check for errors and how much they would pay for their medical visit. Upon choosing “Accept”, patients would be able to divide up their out-of-pocket expenses in up to 26 installments, just like with Cure’s original billing system. This can be done either by payroll deductions (like with the original Cure) or via debit/credit card payments, although only the former can be paid on a pre-tax basis.

The First Global Healthcare Plan

For demonstrative purposes only.

With Remedy’s transformative capabilities, patients no longer need to worry about whether their doctor is covered and who is in their insurer’s network. Cure Pro allows employees to visit any doctor or hospital around the world, given that they accept debit cards as valid payment and sends you a bill in English. This makes Cure Pro the first truly global healthcare plan, providing patients with far more choice of care options than any other plan in human history. Moreover, given that we have no preexisting condition limitations, prior authorization requirements, or arbitrary claim denials, our plan completely blows any other existing competitor out of the water in usability and accessibility of care.

Cure Pro also brings improvements beyond revolutionary technology. First, we have changed the structure of our plan to guarantee our patients protection against emergency care balance bills. Considering that insurers are notorious for being AWOL when their members get surprise bills, we consider this a dramatic step in the healthcare patient experience. We also have integrated our platform’s technology to work with third-party insurers (called “stop loss” in health insurance jargon) to allow any company with 51 or more employees the ability to use Cure Pro to administer their health plans.

Cost Savings for Businesses and Patients

Finally, the combination of the original Cure, Cure Card, and Remedy into one delivers enormous cost savings for both businesses and their employees. First, because of Cure’s 2-day payment in full guarantee, providers are willing to provide prompt pay discounts that exceed those negotiated by insurance. Second, because the cheapest hospitals only accept cash — traditional American health insurance is useless outside the country and the lowest cost American facilities do not accept insurance due to the inefficiency and unreliability of payments — we have near exclusive access to the most affordable doctors and hospitals across the world. Finally, given Remedy is the first fully automated medical bill processing system, the cost of processing a claim for us is virtually zero. Our marketplace also eliminates the need for contracting and networks, which traditional insurers charge $240/year to assemble. With the help of these technological advancements, we can pass on our enormous administrative savings to our customers. Just like with the original Cure, the cost of Cure Pro is 25% of the savings we provide compared to your previous plan (or the national benchmark if you have never previously offered health insurance). In short, since we do not get paid unless you save, you are guaranteed to save at least 11.25% of total healthcare costs due to lower administration costs. Our savings potential continues to be groundbreaking– companies can save up to $9,000 per employee per year when switching to Cure.

With Cure Pro, the AI revolution has officially entered the world of health benefits. While we have only scratched the surface of AI’s potential to make healthcare more efficient and customer friendly, we’re confident that what we’ve done with Cure Pro is second to none in providing you the best health plans known to date.

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