Two Healthcare Leaders Become Patients And Are Enraged By The Billing Bureaucracy September

There is nothing like a dose of reality to change your perspective. This is why the smartest entrepreneurs talk to customers before launching a new product or service. This is why all hospital CEOs and medical device executives should be a patient at a hospital on a regular basis. The transformation after this firsthand experience with the healthcare system is amazing. Here are two stories of hospital visits by healthcare leaders that illustrated the same thing, as Paul Keckley put it: There’s nothing like being a consumer in the health system to remind one of its strengths while being exposed to its flaws.

John Sung Kim is the founder and founding CEO of Five9 and currently leads DocBase in San Francisco. He admits that previously he has viewed patients and providers as whiny. Then he had a motorcycle accident and spent a night in the hospital. He described the experience this way: amazing doctors and nurses, horrible IT, and billing bordering on mail fraud.

While the hospital charged $49,674.80 for that one night stay, my insurer only paid $34,772.36. The rest was “forgiven” by the hospital. I called both the insurer and the hospital – the insurer told me I was fully covered and the hospital made it nearly impossible to get a detailed bill...