Preston Tollinger is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for Collective Health, a software and services company for self-insured employers. His passion is developing simple software solutions to complex systems and processes. After receiving his BS in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, Tollinger joined Trilogy Software as a software engineer where he designed software and tools for the insurance industry. He subsequently worked as a senior software engineer at NASA. Prior to co-founding Collective Health, Tollinger was co-founder and CTO of Cellfire, a leading mobile digital coupon company.
What is Collective Health?
Collective Health is a software and services company recreating the health insurance experience for companies and their people. Our team of engineers, designers and actuaries are starting by redefining the $1 trillion market of employer-sponsored health insurance with data driven products. Using Collective Health’s complete health insurance solution, companies can more intelligently design, administer and operate their health benefits, all while giving their employees a premium experience.
In November, Forbes listed Collective Health as one of seven organizations “that will turn healthcare upside down in 2016.”
Why did you start Collective Health?
Collective Health’s beginning was personal. A of couple years ago, our CEO and co-founder Ali suffered an unforeseen, near-fatal medical emergency that resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. After months of battling the complex and confusing health insurance system to both understand and fight claims denials, he decided it was time to use his technology experience from companies like Yahoo! and AdMob to change how healthcare works for people in the U.S. When Ali approached me with the idea, I was captivated by both the vision of making health insurance better and the complexity of the challenge it presented. This wasn’t a system you could build piecemeal or only support parts of – we would have to build the entire system from the ground up in order to achieve our goals.
What role does technology play in your solution?
Technology is at the core of what we do. In order to provide the kind of health insurance experience people deserve, we knew we had to rebuild the foundation. Our team is developing a whole set of new tools to provide a modern, unified approach to everything from claims adjudication and eligibility management to self-funding financials, data normalization and integration.
To build our real-time system from the ground up, we’ve leveraged some of the best technologies of today, including InterSystems HealthShare, to give our members and their employers a transparent experience with powerful analytics.
What makes your plans different?
Collective Health combines a company’s health plan with the actionable insights and experience they and their people need to make the most of their benefits investment. That means:
- We work with partners such as Anthem and Blue Shield of California to act as a company’s integrated health plan for medical, pharmacy, vision and dental care.
- We streamline plan design and selection, eligibility fi les and self-funding financials.
- We use integrated claims data and analytics to give companies visibility into trends and program performance, including real-time visibility into high-cost claims and desired employee behavioral change.
- We bring all of a company’s benefits programs together on our platform, giving people an integrated, intuitive health insurance experience.
The result: A simplified healthcare experience for employees, more business intelligence and control for companies.
What kind of growth have you seen so far?
In just two years our team and our product have seen tremendous growth. On January 1st we welcomed 30,000 members to our platform, and we’re expecting to process over $200 million in health insurance claims this year. We’re also expanding the availability of our health insurance solution to employers across the U.S., putting us on a trajectory to process more than $2 billion in claims in 2017.
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About InterSystems
InterSystems is a global leader in software for connected care, with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and offices in 25 countries. InterSystems HealthShare® is a health informatics platform that enables strategic interoperability and analytics for action across a hospital network, community, region or nation. InterSystems’ products are used by thousands of hospitals and laboratories worldwide, including all of the top hospitals on the Honor Roll of America’s Best Hospitals as rated by U.S. News and World Report. For more information, visit InterSystems.com.
