Kimberly Darling*

Kimberly Darling is the Founder & President of Competitive Health, Inc. It is the first company in the U.S. to launch a point of care patient payment solution (1996). Ms. Darling started working in health care in 1979 as a regional sales representative for Humana, Inc., she worked in national accounts for CAPP CAPP and while employed for five years at First Health/First Data, earned several national sales awards. After First Health was sold in 1996, she began Competitive Health and developed the first real-time provider platform to determine the net PPO contracted rate at the point of care.

In 1999 she invented a real-time fax back system that negotiates out-of-network claims, soliciting non-contracted providers for a “quick pay” discounts, followed in 2000 with the invention of identifying secondary networks at the time of service and in 2002 developed the first point of service transmission of claim data to a debit/stored value card, which enables patients to pay their providers the “net” amount. In, 2005, over 1.5 million real-time Competitive Health transactions enabled providers to check patient eligibility, determine the PPO contracted rate, receive a faxed explanation and “net” payment due from the patient at the point of care.

Competitive Health in 2006 launched it’s patient web claim lookup bringing it’s customers a simple way to look up contracted information and a provider web portal that reprices the claim at the time of care. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Competitive Health (CH) an important patent for its breakthrough technology used in healthcare transactions. The company’s patent, U.S. Patent 7,346,522, titled "Medical Payment System.”