Our Story
"The research is in, and it’s clear: the key to taming the cost of healthcare isn’t simply re-engineering the current system; the key is to put patients back at the center of the system where they belong."
David Silverstein, Founder of Amaze
The story of Amaze is rooted in the experience of its founder, David Silverstein. Back in 2011, while reviewing some of his own bills, David realized something was truly amiss in American healthcare, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. So, rather than simply paying often confusing and seemingly outrageous bills, he started disputing them. After some success forcing medical providers (mostly hospitals and hospital affiliated physicians) to answer his questions and to walk away from their bills, David formed a non-profit called Broken Healthcare to help other people do the same. Over the years, Broken Healthcare’s “Denial of Payment,” system became a model of revolt, empowering many patients to stand up for themselves and fight back against predatory billing.
In 2016, Broken Healthcare went from advocating for patients in billing disputes to using their stories to advocate for policy change. By 2019, David was at the White House, sitting down with the President and several patients from Colorado to discuss their bills and the changes that need to happen. A month later, new rules and regulations were announced. Now, change is in the hands of government lawyers.
In the meantime, David and some of the terrific people he met along the way decided that regardless of how things play out in Washington, another path to change was needed. So, they formed Amaze PBC, a for-profit Public Benefit Company dedicated to empowering people all over the country to take charge of their own healthcare. The founders of Amaze spent several years conducting research and talking to patients, employers, medical professionals, and many startup companies with bits and pieces of a solution to the complexity of healthcare—or what we call, “The Maze.”
Designing Amaze
The research is in, and it’s clear: the key to taming the cost of healthcare isn’t simply re-engineering the current system; the key is to put patients back at the center of the system where they belong, equipped with the knowledge, skill and self-confidence to make good decisions that lead to lower costs and better care, without sacrificing choice. The line in Forbes a few years ago was prescient; it read: Patient activation is the blockbuster drug of the 21st century. That is the foundational principle behind Amaze.
The call for greater consumerism in healthcare is growing louder by the day. New government rules and regulations are being implemented and new consumer tools are being introduced, yet because of decades of misguided laws, restricted access to information and neglect of the patient’s role, Americans find themselves lacking the very things they most need to navigate the system effectively.
The return on investment for employers is 5x to 10x on an investment of 2% to 3% of annual healthcare spending.
The Amaze solution combines education with a subscription-based mobile service that provides patients with everything they need to manage their own health care, including time-, location-, and needs-based triggers to ensure they always have what they need, when they need it.
With more than 250,000 options on the market, even sophisticated employers struggle to source best-in-class capabilities. None of them are effectively integrated for easy access, with a single independent partner to serve as a patient’s guide. Amaze’s CAST Model is uniquely designed to solve the problems of poor adoption and low utilization by integrating the best, most impactful solutions into one seamless platform. Where necessary, Amaze also integrates each client’s current solutions, so that anything not yet offered by Amaze need not be sacrificed to work with Amaze.
