Facilitating the Medical Banking Industry

This Is Our Story

We need to do better in healthcare and we can! American society, impacted by the twin forces of privacy and IT-enabled community transformation (i.e., the Internet), is reaching an inflection point that is fundamentally changing how banks engage healthcare. Technology transformation has occured in other industries, yet this arena is profoundly different and unique, and extends deep into our everyday lives.

We believe that "medical banking", a term we coined in 1996, will revolutionize healthcare in profound ways for government, business and consumers. The rise of a new "bank infomediary" is inevitable. This new model will integrate high value tools that reduce costs, optimize the reach of care services and engender more investment and focus on transparency and quality in healthcare.

In 1996, our founder challenged banks and healthcare groups to consider this unique strategic opportunity to change the face of American healthcare. Today, our work is captured in a global movement that finds banks investing in healthcare IT in unique and powerful ways. After founding a firm serving academic health centers, that implemented one of the nation's first platforms for streamlining the complex medical remittance (Health Data Management, 1992), our founder sought extensive industry collaboration to move forward on a vision to create a new "medical banking ecosystem". His work led to the creation of the following groups to define and facilitate the medical banking industry.

The Medical Banking Project

Established to research, document and facilitate medical banking convergence or the latent integration of banking technology, infrastructure and credit with healthcare administrative operations. Our role is to facilitate cross-industry dialogue and research, offer strategic direction and outline new models and demonstration projects that can substantively address the underlying business issues for medical banking constituencies.

A major focus is to assist banks to develop "medical banking inter-organizational systems" (MBIOS), systems that link healthcare and banking IT to deliver compelling end user value. Embedding HIPAA compliance across all medical banking programs is a critical first phase of MBIOS development. To further this objective, MBProject has created a Gold Seal Standard. MBProject has created several workgroups to foster organized interaction among stakeholders to assist in MBIOS build out.

After funding MBProject from 2001-2005, the founder opened MBProject to organizational members - now representing some 65 small to global firms that contribute over 200 executives to working programs - to spur new industry growth and advance the principles of medical banking in the marketplace. Global groups like the Walt Disney Company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, ACS, United Healthcare, BancTec and many others are part of our growing list of marquee agents of change in medical banking.

The Medical Banking Institute

This authoritative educational venue offers cross-industry dialogue between leaders in the healthcare and banking industries. The Medical Banking Institute offers a venue for industry announcements and facilitates critical dialogue with officials from government and commerce to advance understanding of medical banking issues. Hailed by attendees, the Third National Medical Banking Institute was credited with launching the medical banking industry.

In 2006, a new President's Council was commissioned to provide peer review and assistance for our educational programming at the Institute. At the 2008 Institute, MBProject launched two critical resources for a growing medical banking community: a new Gold Seal Standard for assuring data privacy and security and a trade journal - The International Journal of Medical Banking - to educate a diverse constituency on new medical banking ideas.

Medical Banking Leadership Forums

Visit the nation's only "medical banking lab", a critical resource for commerce and policy that offers valuable cross-industry insight for MBProject members and invited guests. Our Forums help leaders to learn about what works, what doesn't and isolates emerging best practices in this often complex area. Used by top corporate executives, the Forum helps banks, healthcare organizations and IT firms to re-scope business services along medical banking lines of thinking.

Leadership Forums offer MBProject's latest thinking on how companies get ahead of the curve by putting theory into practice. They provide both an intimate gathering of industry leaders as well as a venue for MBProject's internal working process.

Common Standards Guide: Adopted in 2008, our new process involves the creation of Focus Groups who address vital industry challenges. Focus Groups, via a majority vote, become official Workgroups. These groups are required to report out at the Institute and Forums and to create deliverables that, if approved by the general membership, become part of our new Common Standards Guide. The Guide offers our best thinking on standards and best practices in medical banking. Some examples of our deliverables include the Gold Seal program and a new "Deductible Engine" program that advances the idea of real time adjudication in the marketplace.

• C.O.M.B.A.T.: This strategic initiative was the precursor to the implementation of our Common Standards Guide. Two pilot programs, one funded by United Healthcare in the area of real time adjudication and the other focused on bank-driven PHRs, resulted from this effort.

Facilitated by these resources medical banking models will improve and accelerate MBProject's destination of integrating "charitable community resources" onto medical banking platforms. We call this effort "CarevilleTV".

CarevilleTV
Rebranded from "Charitable Communities Network", the founder of MBProject supports a strategic objective, global in nature, to developed "advanced community care platforms" that link care resources with banking systems to better coordinate community healthcare. We believe this model could have a far reaching impact on healthcare (see summary - requires QuickTime). A development platform is located at www.ccnhelp.org. Launched at the Third National Medical Banking Institute, MBProject is working with leading banks, employers and public health departments to refine the business model. Originally conceived by the founder of MBProject in 1996, CarevilleTV supports MBProject's mission to convert digital savings into charitable resources.

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Our collective attitude towards funding American healthcare is changing dramatically. Consider the rate of growth of America's uninsured and "under-insured" population, the latter of which is unfortunately fast becoming all of us. We believe that the destiny of this popular movement will be the creation of dynamic community networks that integrate public, private and charitable and faith-based funding sources into a digital framework that supports community healthcare.

We hope you find our work to contain an authoritative articulation of the emerging cross-industry realities of medical banking. Our work, firmly grounded upon rich streams of cross-industry empirical research and many years of hands-on working experience, is focused on supporting healthcare access through interfirm management patterns that optimize banking services for care givers. Fundamental to this objective is disproportionate relief for struggling rural providers who represent the primary "field operatives" who provide healthcare to the great majority of families in America and around the globe.