We were flattered to be featured on Health News Review not long ago.
The review featured our blog post on health-care pricing, specifically MRI’s. The two posts they focused on, on “How much does an MRI Cost?” related what we had found about pricing — in Part 1 and Part 2.
“This is helpful, albeit maddeningly frustrating, information,” the writer, Gary Schwitzer, said, in his analysis of our information.
Schwitzer, who is the founding father and moving spirit of Health News Review, is one of the biggest forces for careful analysis of health-care reporting. The HealthNewsReview site says its mission is “to improve the public dialogue about health care by helping consumers critically analyze claims about health care interventions and by promoting the principles of shared decision-making reinforced by accurate, balanced and complete information about the tradeoffs
involved in health care decisions.”
This review came fast on the heels of a pair of articles in The Observer, which also were very complimentary.
“Ever opened a letter from a doctor to discover an unexpectedly, eye-poppingly enormous bill?” wrote Kelly Faircloth in The Observer. “Well, one New York startup wants to make sure that never happens again, by providing a platform that allows the average medical consumer to compare prices.”
Faircloth’s piece, “Clear Health Costs Wants to Save You From Medical Sticker Shock,” appeared in September, right after we did a demo at the New York Tech Meetup.
The first Observer piece was about a demo we did late in the summer for a group formed by Change the Ratio, Rachel Sklar’s group focusing on the work of women in tech, and the New York Tech Meetup, the groundbreaking Meetup group that features and supports New York technologists and their work.
“The most impressive presentation of the night came from Jeanne Pinder, the founder and CEO of Clear Health Costs, a startup dedicated to increasing the transparency of the healthcare industry,” Erica Schwiegershausen of The Observer wrote about us in “Our Favorite Startups From Women’s Demo Night, Hosted by New York Tech Meetup and Change the Ratio.” “ ‘The problem we’re trying to solve is that nobody has any idea what stuff costs in healthcare,’ said Ms. Pinder, who worked at the New York Times for over 20 years before receiving multiple grants to launch Clear Health Costs.”
Jeanne Pinder is the founder and CEO of ClearHealthCosts. She worked at The New York Times for almost 25 years as a reporter, editor and human resources executive, then volunteered for a buyout and founded ClearHealthCosts.
With Pinder at the helm, ClearHealthCosts shared honors for the top network public service journalism project in a partnership with CBS News, as well as winning numerous other journalism prizes.
She was previously a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University School of Journalism. ClearHealthCosts has won grants from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York; the International Women’s Media Foundation; the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with KQED public radio in San Francisco and KPCC in Los Angeles; the Lenfest Foundation in Philadelphia for a partnership with The Philadelphia Inquirer; and the New York State Health Foundation for a partnership with WNYC public radio/Gothamist in New York; and other honors.
She is one of Crain’s Notable Women in Tech. Niemanlab wrote of ClearHealthCosts that “The Internet hates secrets.”
Her TED talk about fixing health costs has surpassed 2 million views.