Post date: Sep 18, 2017 12:20:19 AM
HealthSelect
The selection of a health plan, from among several available through an employer (or today, over health care exchanges), is a complex decision problem for most households and businesses. Lime many decision problems, there are multiple conflicting objectives, the primary ones being cost, quality, and choice. Moreover, the cost objective usually involves a gamble between upfront costs such as premium vs recurring costs such as co-pay and deductibles. The gamble along all objectives is multifaceted because it may involve multiple events during the selection period. In the mid-1990s, I collaborated with a dentist-entrepreneur to build web-based decision support tools (HealthSelect and SelexSys) to help consumer-employees pick a health plan that presented the optimal mix of cost, quality, and choice, under an uncertain health environment. The entrepreneurial effort lasted two years until it folded for lack of business partnerships, data and capital.