What We Do

Picwell is committed to empowering ordinary Americans to make good health insurance choices for themselves and their families. The sheer complexity of health insurance leads many people to essentially choose at random. This results in unnecessarily high costs for consumers and billions of dollars of waste in the healthcare system.

We use predictive analytics in combination with healthcare and behavioral economics research to reduce the choice complexity. A user’s plan options are distilled down to personalized scores, which incorporate many nuances beyond pure cost, including the user’s risk tolerance and preferred physicians. Picwell allows users to purchase a health plan that covers what they need, at a reasonable cost, with minimal stress.

Currently, we have two enterprise health-insurance-recommendation product lines, covering the Medicare and commercial healthcare spaces through healthcare brokers and insurance companies. The core of the Picwell product is a sophisticated healthcare cost-simulator and predictor. The cost-predictions augmented by several economics-informed components that capture intangibles, like tolerance to risk exposure and the value of keeping your preferred physician. We are working hard to extend and refine our capabilities in order to cover a broader range of channels through which people obtain health insurance.

Picwell has helped hundreds of thousands of real people make better health insurance choices. If that sounds like work you would be excited to do, we want to talk to you.

Who We Are

Picwell was founded by several professors at the Wharton School at UPenn who study health economics and consumer decision-making and wanted to do something about the problem with health insurance choice, instead of just demonstrating through research why it is difficult. We've since grown to about 20 full-time employees, and our team includes software engineers, data engineers, ops engineers, data scientists, economists, sales & marketing, and client relations and product specialists. Picwellians value collaboration and highly, and we always aim to achieve high-fidelity integration across roles. Because we work closely together, there are lots of opportunities to learn new skills. Our software engineers get exposed to machine learning and data processing; our data scientists build up their software skills, and we strive to maintain a culture of mentorship and communication.

Our main office is in Philadelphia PA.

The Interview Process

You'll start with a phone call (or perhaps coffee, if you're local) to discuss your interests and skills and how you might fit into a role at Picwell. If that goes well, we'll ask you to do a short, domain-related work sample and either a remote or an in-person pair-programming session with one of our engineers or data scientists. These problems are designed to show off your full capability-set as a technical contributor (not just your ability to regurgitate CS101 algorithms), and we hope that they will give you some insight into the kind of work that Picwellians do. Also, this is the only part of the interview process in which you'll be asked to write any code: we will never ask you to code on a whiteboard. Finally, we'll bring you out to the Philadelphia office to meet the team.