Point Your Phone at It
- The problem
- A letter, a bill or a medicine label turns up and you cannot tell what it wants from you.
- You will
- Photograph a real one and get it read back in plain words, with the next step spelled out.
- Takes
- 15 minutes. Works on a free account.
Why this matters
Why this matters
Dana's insurer sent two pages about her son's ear infection. The phrase printed on it was "adverse benefit determination" and the number on it was $1,340. She read it twice, could not tell whether she owed that money or the hospital did, and put it back in the envelope, where it stayed for five weeks.
Dana could have worked that letter out. It would have taken an hour with a pen, on an evening when nobody needed anything from her, and that evening never came. The deadline printed on page two went past while the letter sat in the drawer. A lot of official post gets handled this way, by people who read perfectly well.
Today you photograph one page and get back five things: what the document is, what it wants from you, the date it wants it by, what happens if you do nothing, and the first thing to do about it.
There is no account to connect and no setting to change. You hold your phone over a piece of paper. Luis did his first one in the back of his truck, pointed at the safety plate on a hired stump grinder that would not start.
