I would like to welcome Quicken Medical Expense Manager as the newest partner to this blog.

The NY Times recently wrote about the bewildering array of paperwork that accompanies the patient anytime they use the medical system:

Medical paperwork is a world of co-payments and co-insurers, deductibles, exclusions and contracted fees. Nothing is as it seems: patients receive statements that often do not reflect what is actually owed; telephone calls to customer service agents are at best time-consuming and at worst fruitless. The explanations of benefits that insurers send out – known as E.O.B.’s – are filled with unintelligible codes.

With the shift towards consumer-directed health plans, the burden of cost responsibility will increasingly shift towards the patient. Which means the paperwork will only increase.

Enter the Quicken Medical Expense Manager. Created by an Intuit employee to track out-of-control medical bills, this is an elegant program to sort through the barrage of medical paperwork one encounters as a patient. I use it to track my own family’s medical expenses.

Features include a medical log, to keep a simple, ongoing record of each family member’s medical appointments and prescriptions, for quick answers about past expenses, as well as tools to track medical history.

Of course, a key feature is the ability to track flexible spending accounts (FSA) health expenditures.

More sample screenshots can be found here.

You can also view a product demo.

Highly recommended.