As evidence that government intervention can spur innovation in payments, US Bank has announced their launch of Payment Navigator™ and Payment Consolidator™. These solutions are designed to better enable consumer healthcare payments at the point of service and provide greater efficiencies for medical back offices.
“Unlike most industries where payment is expected at the point of sale, the healthcare payment system was built around hospitals and providers working through complex, manual processes to get paid for their services by insurance companies,” said Ralph Bernstein, senior vice president of U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems’ Healthcare Payment Solutions division. “The system wasn’t designed for consumers to easily understand their financial obligations or for providers to easily collect payment from them. With consumers now bearing more direct and immediate financial responsibility, providers need solutions that help them answer patient billing questions and make payment collection processes easy for patients, leaving them more time to focus on what’s important—providing quality care.”
We believe that the healthcare payments market continues to provide net new growth opportunities for electronic payments on both sides of the transaction.
It’s also exposing a largely paper-based billing system that is costly to manage: Of the $200 billion billed to Americans annually for healthcare expenses, it’s estimated only 20 percent is remitted via electronic payment, according to a 2010 report by the Mercator Advisory Group. This paper-based payment system creates confusion for patients who receive multiple explanations of benefit statements and invoices and are unsure about what to pay. In return, providers are faced with the financial strain of growing patient account receivables.