About a month ago, I got some new glasses, as shown in this grab from my Monday’s appearance on Bloomberg (quite possibly the most unprepared professional TV hosts of all time, but that’s another story). I bought them from this boutique in Soho and got the lenses from my local shop in Williamsburg. I knew I’d have to pay for them up front and then get reimbursed by VSP, the vision insurer that covers all Sherpaa employees. So I logged in to my Sherpaa account, created an insurance case, snapped a photo of the separate receipts for my frames and lenses, and submitted them to our insurance experts to file the claim and get me reimbursed. All went just fine. Then I got some snail mail from VSP saying they denied my claim. I logged back in to Sherpaa, snapped a photo of the denial and asked our insurance experts, “What gives?” Our experts sleuthed, discovered the “problem,” fixed it, and I was just notified that the check is in the mail. This took me a total of about 2 or 3 minutes. If I didn’t have Sherpaa, this probably would have taken me at least an hour, if not more. I probably would have just put the entire thing off, because I’m too busy with work, and would have let this company screw me out of a few hundred bucks, because it’s just too time-consuming and annoying to deal with them.

We launched Sherpaa with just medical inquiries powered by doctors. But we quickly realized that people were asking us insurance questions, so we launched a service that tackles health insurance nightmares like this, powered by health insurance experts. And today, about a third of all inquiries in Sherpaa are insurance questions like this. Sometimes our doctors have to work together with the insurance experts to solve problems. Our goal is to be the intelligent go-to service that sits on top of the healthcare industry, that takes these problems off your hands and turns this annoying, confusing mess into something painless.