Narrowing down the 'choice overload' of health care options

A Penn research team led by Wharton professor Jonathan Kolstad and former medical care company executive Jay Silverstein founded Picwell, a start-up that narrows down extensive health care options. The Daily Pennsylvanian sat down with the pair to learn more about how it works. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Daily Pennsylvanian: What is Picwell, and how does the company’s program work?

Jay Silverstein: Picwell is a company specifically focused on helping people solve the riddle of picking the ideal health plan ... It’s kind of the the first of it’s kind, a company that marries together predictive analytics ... and big data along with a wealth of industry knowledge to create a seamless and very easy way for individuals ... to sort through the confusion of the maze that is health care. Health care is one of the most important decisions people make every year, a decision that even the most sophisticated of experts might as well be making throwing darts at a dartboard. And with this system and this program ... we are enabling individuals to sort through and pick the best health plan for [themselves]. That’s how the whole thing works ... The idea is that the tool is available through every exchange platform, employer, broker, anyone who is in the business of selling or helping people or offering health plans to people.

DP: What inspired you to open this start-up? What inspired you to create it?

Jonathan Kolstad: [Health care is] just the consummate example for choice overload, and for years I’ve been teaching that hey, this is a great opportunity for people to solve it, we have the technology invented, and finally we decided that maybe it’s time to put our efforts where our mouth[s are]. So we took it on, and it turns out there’s a reason it hasn’t been solved. It takes a really specific set of knowledge, combining methods from really different disciplines, from the tech sector, from the data analytics sector and the economics sector in one place.

DP: Where are you getting seed funding from?

JS: The original money that we received was from friends and family, and we’ve been very fortunate to be able to build our launch product and it’s resonated in the market, to the point where we’ve got several clients who are essentially generating revenue with us so we’re in a very good position to be able to decide how we pursue next without necessarily needing to go out and do the normal realms of financing.

JK: That said, we will eventually go down that path as we continue to expand and push and bring new products to market, as well as continuing to enhance our presence in the marketplace.

DP: Going off of that, what are your plans for the start-up’s future?

JS: [John] once pointed out to me that essentially what we do is at it’s core, [is] taking extremely complex emotion-laden issues and present[ing] elegantly simple solutions ... Looking out at the bigger picture, there’s potential for us to be in a very interesting place at the intersection of health and wealth. And so that starts bringing in a lot of different factors because they’re certainly two of the major things that people think about, and certainly as people get older they become more and more intertwined.

DP: Is there anything else like Picwell out there? Is it unique?

JK: There’s nothing like this. There are folks who are interested in this question generally, but what you see is a lot of players in the exchange space often really focused on the front-end user experience ... but that misses a lot of the important details of it ...

JS: If we just look at the health care selection arena, thats been an industry for quite a long time, what you have are sorting engines, like Priceline is a bit like a sorting engine. The problem is that a sorting engine in health gets you to the wrong place faster. You also have some elements of TurboTax problems. The problem with those models is that they are retrospective not forward-looking. And they don’t contemplate all of the complexities ... that are embedded in the health care system.

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