Scott MacStravic, PhD
The Fifth Annual Medical Banking Institute is to be held in Marietta, GA on March 5-7 this year, clearly indicating that there has been something around called “medical banking” for five years, though I confess to not having heard of it before. It indicates the increasing commonality of characteristics, interests, and even overlapping and interdependent functions of health care and financial “institutions”.
The announcement I read on this upcoming conference asserts that: “On our collective journey towards better healthcare using technology, banks are uniquely positioned to catapult emerging eHealth projects around the country into a secure, seamless, consumer-oriented network.” [“Banking on Better Healthcare Featured at the Fifth National Medical Banking Institute” PRNewswire.com Feb 1, 2007]
Certainly, banks are increasing their involvement in healthcare. They support credit card payment at point of service, patient loans to pay the increasing portion of bills that consumers are being required to bear, health spending/saving accounts, and virtually any financial transactions between patients and providers. After all, banks are concerned with people’s “wealth asset” in much the same way as HCOs are concerned with their “health asset”, though usually on a much more proactive and continuous basis.
The term “medical banking” was reportedly coined in 1996, and has been copyrighted, by the people involved in the Medical Banking Project (www.mbproject.org). It aims to enable HCOs and individual providers focus more on what they do best, deliver excellent clinical care, while banks focus on the financial transactions related thereto. But the two would become more truly “partners” if banks achieve what appears to be the vision of at least some.
One element of this vision, specific to the Medical Banking Project, is to digitalizing payment transactions between consumers and providers, including the management of providers’ ER accounts and charitable funds. This is projected to save significantly on the costs of such transactions and management, enabling HCOs to operate more efficiently, and freeing more resources for serving the uninsured population, through a “Charitable Communities NetworkTM”. [“Our Vision, Our Mission” Medical Banking Project Feb 3, 2007 (www.mbproject.com)
Perhaps even more important is the idea of having banks host personal health records in “community care platforms” that will enable such PHRs to become lifetime/all places resources for patients and providers, and enable the coordination, even true integration of the kinds of continuity of care currently impossible. (“A Medical Banking Road Map for America”, available through the Medical Banking Project)
Given all the attention currently being given to developing a truly interoperable electronic medical and personal health record system for community-level and even national use in revolutionizing healthcare, the entry of banks into the arena may prove interesting, along with governments, community organizations, technology firms, employers, insurers, and other stakeholders. At a minimum, it brings into the mix organizations that have a history of performing with an enormously lower rate of errors than healthcare is used to.
The question will always be the extent to which “medical banking” will benefit providers, patients, and payors, in competition with the banks, of course. None who are used to dealing with banks, and their imaginative ability to find ways of adding fees, penalties, interest, and similar sources of revenue, compared to relatively modest generosity with respect to what they deliver in service or interest paid, should doubt that the banks will do very well under any arrangements they have a say in arranging. But it should help ensure that HCOs, as the Chinese saying recommends, live in interesting times.
