Finestra

👋Hello Product Hunt Community! I’m Tae Young, founder of Finestra. I’m super excited to share with you something that I personally believe should have existed for a looong time, but is needed now more than ever. ⚡️Finestra is a search engine for medical bills in the US. Think “Glassdoor for medical bills.” ✍🏻BACKGROUND I lost my job in NY at the start of the pandemic, and was too scared to get a COVID test because I had lost my health insurance & had no idea how much the test would cost me (this was before tests were free). As I frantically looked through Glassdoor to look for new job opportunities and company information, I thought, “Can there be a model like this for medical bills, where patients share their bills and experiences on an easy-to-use search engine?” The idea only accelerated when the Hospital Price Transparency Rule went into effect on January 1, 2021. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), requires all hospitals in the US to publish pricing information about items and services they provide. The information provided directly by hospitals form the foundation of our data, and we are adding real bills submitted by patients to provide the most accurate range of prices for every procedure provided by the hospitals. 🔥PRODUCT Search the name of the procedure you are looking for, along with your ZIP code and insurance plan. This allows us to show you the providers closest to you & what you may be charged according to your insurance plan. 🗽LAUNCHED IN NYC AND SF🌉 We started in our home base — New York City. We currently have over 3.5 million price data points from over 100 hospitals in the greater New York City region. We also added hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area last week, adding another 1 million price data points from almost 50 hospitals in the Bay Area. 🙆TEAM We have a core team based in NYC — Frederick and I have been friends since high school, and he and Austin are childhood friends. Looking back, it’s fascinating to see how childhood friends got linked up to tackle one of America’s biggest problems! 🏃NEXT STEPS: REFINING PRICES & EXPANDING ACROSS THE US The lists of prices that hospitals have published in compliance with the Hospital Price Transparency Rule are extremely large and complex; these lists include discounted cash prices as well as negotiated charges with insurance companies. Our team is working hard to decode the data and display the most accurate prices for each provider and insurance plan. We also can’t wait to be active all throughout the US! We are a small team so we are working city by city, but we are expanding as quickly as we can. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please leave a comment below! You can reach me on Twitter @taeyoungwoo as well. Thank you!