Cedar founder and CEO Florian Otto is disrupting medical billing because he clearly knows what he is up against.
Like many entrepreneurs, Mr. Otto’s personal experience led him to create Cedar, but his was more personal than most. In 2015 his wife (then fiancée) had a medical emergency in New York City. Luckily she was soon cleared, but unbeknownst to both of them, trouble was brewing.
While she swiped her credit card at the hospital and thought that was the end of it, they was mistaken. One month later she received her first invoice, which was a stack of papers in medical terminology, with a call to action of logging into a portal. Weeks later the imaging invoice arrived. This time it was a slip of paper directing her to fill in her credit card information and mail it back. Six months later a debt collector call about a bill she never received.
“Right now we’re in the center of New York,” Mr. Otto said. “I can ride with Uber, eat with my phone, everything is personalized with my Amazon account. My Netflix is on demand anywhere, I can book my table for dining online and pay with PayPal, but this is what is happening in health care. The experience is broken.”
That was the impetus for Cedar, where the goal to touch as many patients and to improve their lives as much as possible. Patients receive personalized digital billing based on their preferences and needs. Mr. Otto aims to serve 50 per cent of Americans in the coming years.
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