The founders met while working together at a Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical company, where they spent a combined 20+ years solving for barriers that prevent patients from getting the care and medicine they need.
After addressing & readdressing these problems every year to account for annual insurance enrollment changes, it hit them – if they can help consumers make wiser decisions from the get-go, they should be able to facilitate better access to healthcare and, therefore, better health.
This is the moonshot ambition of MATRX Health.
We founded this company to use our industry expertise to help the masses, but it became personal when Kathryn’s 7-year-old son, Colin, became sick.
Doctors told her it was just a virus, but after five days of an uncontrollable fever that developed into unbearable chest pain, she took Colin to a hospital. New to the area, she didn’t know which hospital would deliver the best care, so she googled for the closest one. Unfortunately, it was the wrong choice.
The hospital admitted him and gave antibiotics, confident he had pneumonia and would be fine in a few days. But he got worse - difficulty breathing, severe swelling, and ultimate organ failure. After the doctors refused to admit his progression wasn’t normal, Kathryn pushed for more testing, which they declined, insisting it wasn’t necessary and he was ‘out of the woods.’ After much mama persistence, they finally agreed to a chest x-ray and immediately found out his condition was much worse than they thought.
Turns out Kathryn’s “mom gut” was right. The x-ray showed he had necrotizing pneumonia and a large pleural effusion (i.e. an aggressive form of pneumonia and 2500mL of fluid in his chest that led to his lung being crushed from inside out). With the first hospital lacking the level of care required to provide emergency surgery & ICU care, the doctors expedited a hospital transfer to get him the services he needed, but not before the head of the department said, “thank goodness for mom gut!” and, my personal favorite, “at least you don’t need to pay the full ambulance bill from insurance since he now needs to be transferred!”
In hindsight, it was a tough realization to understand the dire circumstances could have been avoided if Colin had been taken to the right hospital first. In the age of Consumerism and the ability to quickly be served relevant information to make timely decisions – airlines, restaurants, driving directions, delivery services… it’s time for healthcare to do the same.
Data powers consumer decision-making. Real-time traffic diverts our GPS to a different route. Location data calls the nearest taxi to pick us up. Ratings tell us which restaurants are worth dining at. This is true in all other industries except for healthcare.
Today, consumers don’t have easy access to healthcare data that can help them make critical decisions. There is little-to-no transparency in the system and the consumer’s health, time, and money are left in the hands of insurers, hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies.
Our mission is to give power back to consumers. By leveraging real-time, verified experiences of others, we’ll get you access to the info you need, when you need it most. It’s time to stop low-quality providers from hiding behind complicated jargon & codes...it’s time Two Be Honest.
Our 1st order of business is health insurance because it’s impossible to get care if you can’t pay for it. Over 75% of Americans say their health plan did not pay for care their doctor said they needed. But none of this is recorded in public reviews, so there is no mechanism to drive business to improve their services.
TwoBeHonest.com will serve that need by publishing both objective government rankings & unfiltered reviews from members.
