Personal Tech: Did you pay that doctor?
It's testament to the mess that is our medical payments system–where providers, insurers, and patients pass paper like cards in some high-stakes game of "Go Fish"–that it takes a computer program to help you keep track of everything. Introducing the new Quicken Medical Expense Manager (initially $50, going later to $70, at quickenmedical.com), designed to document doctor visits, prescriptions, and other costly medical events, as well as the resulting insurance payments, rejections, and disputes. It even includes form letters for resolving those disputes, but you'll have to provide your own expletives.
It's the latest consumer market tapped by Intuit, the company that has made a good living by helping us deal with life's other fiscal complexities, including its TurboTax and Quicken personal finance programs.
Medical Expense Manager isn't the first program to tackle consumer medical expenses but is a slick one, with drop-down menus and boxes that automatically complete repetitive entries such as the name of a doctor or hospital. The program is easy to navigate and understand, organizing data around each member of the family and producing lists of pending and disputed charges, as well as flexible spending accounts and tax deductions.
But the program surprisingly doesn't talk to Intuit's other products, so you have to manually transfer the deductions and spending from Medical Expense Manager to TurboTax and Quicken. The health-expense program also lacks a way to tie its data to any copies of medical forms that you might scan into your computer, which is a great way to keep them handy for disputes.
Like all personal organizers, the software will only work as well as the information it holds. Unlike with Quicken's checkbook managers, which pull data from banks and brokers across the Web, there is no way to similarly download from insurers or providers. So somebody must type the information, and that takes time. Nevertheless, as the ante for healthcare continues to climb, any advantage you can get might be worthwhile.