Making introductions

As a new player in the healthcare data business, we want to let you know why we started this company and what we can do that might be different than others.

Motivations

If I had a nickel for every time someone claimed "healthcare is broken", I could have retired years ago. So I will not start with a grand pronouncement. Instead, I will share some personal anecdotes because everything in life is ultimately personal.

My parents in-law are retired doctors. Proud to be doctors, but very glad to be retired. After dinners at their house, my mother in law's face would drop, her shoulders would hunch, and she'd reluctantly get up from the table to spend a few hours on Epic charting her patient encounters that day. Because if it isn't charted, it can't be coded and billed, and the whole system falls apart. My father in law, a multiple sclerosis specialist, would tell me each day how much time he spent navigating an insurer's phone tree to get a prescription approved for his patient. Time that he would much rather be using actually seeing patients and helping them.

This is a small scale realization of the demoralization of doctors that others have noticed. The source of the demoralization is that they are trying to serve two masters: the patient and the billing bureaucracy when they should only be serving one. Price transparency is a first step toward making everyone aware of the real price so that billing and reimbursement becomes simpler.

Skills

Ask anyone who has worked with the payer price transparency data and the first thing they mention is how gosh-darned big the data set is. They aren't wrong. Fortunately, myself and my cofounders are the right people for the job.

My real summer job in high school was writing a embedded C code for a company which made vans similar to Google Street View's. I managed to write what was then the fastest JPEG compressor in existence, mostly by writing a quantized DCT routine for the AltiVec instruction set and being very careful to keep the current working set in cache (G4's had a terrible front side memory bus). If that's gobbledygook to you, just know that I wrote some fast data processing code. Fortunately, processing this price transparency data is very similar. With a few simple tricks like streaming JSON parsing and deduplicating in memory before writing to disk, the data set becomes manageable.

My co-founder Dave Childers is tailor-made for this data set. He's been a statistician / data scientist his whole career and can find the needle in the proverbial haystack. He's constantly at work figuring out what the data really means and how to interpret it.

Vision

There are a lot of middlemen in healthcare. Tynbil is one of them. We know our role: make everything surrounding pricing and reimbursement easier, cheaper, and more straightforward. That's the only way we can earn our place.

Tynbil is small at 3 people. We're out to support ourselves and our families, not make huge sums for venture capitalists. We pledge to offer our data, insights, and abilities for reasonable amounts. We hope you can trust us on this and help normalize price transparency among providers, payers, employers, and patients.

–– Brendan Younger