Consumers facing the often overwhelming task of staying on top of health care bills, claims and paperwork now have an electronic option that may ease the burden.

Until now, the national push for automated, paperless health care billing and record-keeping has largely focused on big entities such as hospitals and insurers, leaving consumers out of the advances.

But Intuit, maker of personal finance and tax preparation software Quicken and TurboTax, has come up with a new program to manage medical bills and statements, track progress toward insurance deductibles, find and fix errors, and even dispute claims. Its move may prompt other software makers to develop competing products.

In using Quicken Medical Expense Manager, the first thing that pops up is a log for each family member’s expenses, including pets if you wish to include them. You can sort by any field and toggle between billing notes and medical notes, or flexible-spending account entries and eligible expenses for tax deductions, for example.

It’s a standalone product designed to aid people with a relatively large number of medical expenses, such as families with young children, people with chronic conditions, households with multiple insurers and seniors with supplemental Medicare policies, said Lisa Rogers, Intuit’s category manager for health care.

And a quick FYI: Quicken’s personal finance software is a separate enterprise that doesn’t integrate with the Medical Expense Manager for those who have more than one Intuit product, she said.

“People think about their medical expenses differently than they do their personal finances,” Rogers said. “Personal finances are all about accounts and spending and transactions, and medical expenses are about people.”

Despite a decade-long focus on getting U.S. health-care information technology up to speed, consumers remain decidedly low-tech – and not by choice, said Eric Brown, vice president and research director for Forrester Research.

Many people, he said, still operate with manila folders and have to photocopy and send bills in; wait to receive the explanation of benefits, or EOB; maintain files of claims submitted but not yet reimbursed; and otherwise track billing activities.

Brown is enthusiastic about Quicken’s new product, though he hasn’t yet seen or tried it.

“This is a genius idea,” he said.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, nudged the industry toward automating the process of filing and paying claims, but it benefited businesses, he said.

“The consumer still lives in a totally paper world,” Brown said. “The timing is perfect because we’re entering an era of consumer-directed health plans where consumers are expected to share a larger burden through (health savings accounts) and as a result become smart shoppers … and try to understand the value they’re getting from the health system.”

Health savings accounts are investment vehicles designed to shelter health expenses from taxes when paired with a high-deductible insurance policy that puts the employee on the hook for the first $1,000 or $2,000 of expenses, depending on family status.

The consumer-driven model, which shifts to workers more of the costs and responsibility to manage and compare health care, has been gaining traction with employers.

In fact, 56 percent of employees at each company who were offered a consumer-driven plan for 2005 enrolled in it, up from 50 percent last year, according to Hewitt Associates, which administers benefits for more than 18 million workers and their families.

“In a consumer-directed world, I need tools,” Brown said. “I think this (Quicken Medical Expense Manager) is an excellent complement to the types of tools consumers will need to manage the health system. Frankly, it’s way overdue.”

Running totals

Quicken’s product helps consumers keep a running total of what they spend, allowing them to sort by any field for which they’ve entered data.

People who find it hard to gauge whether their medical expenses total 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income – the threshold needed for a tax deduction – may find automatic updates of mileage associated with medical expenses especially useful if they need to account for routine travel, Rogers said.

There’s space for keying in a medical history, test results and doctor’s instructions, she said. And the program can help people estimate their annual expenses if their employer offers a pretax flexible-spending account.

“One of the biggest problems with the FSA is guessing how much to put in based on past expenses,” Rogers said.

The software also helps jump-start the process of troubleshooting administrative errors or filing a complaint. Consumers who don’t like what they see when they open an envelope from a provider can click on “dispute letter” to chose among three preformatted letters: one each for when a provider failed to credit a payment, billed for the wrong service or didn’t file an insurance claim.

Two other preformatted letters can help you take the first step in filing a grievance with your insurer in case the company didn’t pay a claim or paid less than expected.

Codes yellow, blue

The program’s layout differentiates claims statuses visually. Entries being disputed are color-coded yellow, and those that are pending show up with a blue background.

The other big personal-finance software program, Microsoft Money, doesn’t offer anything expressly devoted to medical expenses, though it does provide the ability to track medical expenses as part of a larger financial picture, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

Of course, Quicken’s new product isn’t for everyone. People who don’t use a lot of medical services, have a lot of prescriptions or many bills to manage likely wouldn’t benefit, Brown said.

Early users report they’d like to see insurance-coverage parameters and health-plan detail included in the product, a feature that doesn’t yet exist, Rogers said.

And the Quicken programs don’t interact with each other – and with providers – the way some people might like in this early version.

Whether Microsoft will give Intuit a run for its consumer health-care dollars remains to be seen, Brown said.

“I know that Microsoft is very interested in the health care sector from the standpoint of the consumer, but it’s not clear how it’s going to express itself.”

A strategy that may emerge for either player is combining medical-expense management with wellness management, Brown said.

“Microsoft might be able to deliver on both of those because they have MSN as a consumer content portal and they have Money as a consumer financial manager,” Brown said. “Quicken can only do one of those two things.”

Overall, Brown said, he’s relieved to see some recourse arrive to help overburdened consumers organize their health care paperwork as costs spiral ever higher.

“There are millions of Americans out there devising their own schemes for managing this, and many more who have not and are in a reactive mode of paying bills when they appear and hoping for the best,” he said.

Quicken Medical Expense Manager is available from its dedicated Web site, www.QuickenMedicalExpenseManager.com, for an introductory rate of $49.99.