Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Chini Krishnan, CEO of GetInsured (Part 1)

Digital marketplaces are becoming part of public services. Chini discusses state health insurance programs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to GetInsured.

Chini Krishnan: I’m the Founder and CEO of GetInsured. We, at GetInsured, help Americans navigate the healthcare system. My passion for doing that is the driving force for what we do at GetInsured every day. We were founded back in 2005.

We began by just designing a site that would make it easy for Americans to find and purchase health insurance the same way you would buy a plane ticket or book a hotel room online. We’ve grown a lot since those early days.

Since we were first founded, our goal was to just service customers directly. After the passage of the Affordable Care Act, we had to change our business model and shift our focus to service various states that were building health insurance marketplaces called exchanges. That’s what we do today.

We offer a cloud-based platform along with services to supports states that enroll consumers in health insurance. We are the market leaders in the space. We support California, Idaho, and Minnesota.

Sramana Mitra: Your software is a marketplace software specifically focused on the health insurance space. You white label it for the various states and let them run their own marketplaces. Is that what you’re saying?

Chini Krishnan: That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Sramana Mitra: What’s different from state to state? What are you seeing and what are you learning?

Chini Krishnan: There are a couple of trends that we are seeing across the state. The biggest one that we see is a broad shift to the cloud and to SaaS-based systems. Most entrepreneurs are familiar with private sector adoption of the cloud.

Historically, the private sector has had a track record of building bespoke systems for health programs and other sorts of programs. These systems and the methodology for building them date back to the 90’s and 2000’s. They tend to be more cumbersome and costly.

What we’re seeing now is a shift to cloud-based solutions to replace this form of legacy-based systems. That’s a big part of what we’re seeing.

Another part of what we’re seeing is that when states want to have natural differences in policies, those are addressed through the flexibility of cloud-based platforms as opposed to needing to build custom systems from the ground up. Those are two very big industry trends that we’re seeing.

Sramana Mitra: Are there instances or examples of things that you can do because of these digital marketplaces that were not possible to do before?

Chini Krishnan: Yes. If you look at the entire fabric of the Affordable Care Act or the Medicaid system, they were impossible to run without online technologies. The very fabric of how they run and the eligibility of the programs requires that there be complex online systems.

A consumer inputs on one hand but then bounces it off against several systems in real time. We are well into the age where the functions of the welfare state can only be rendered thanks to the internet.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Chini Krishnan, CEO of GetInsured
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