Unfortunately I fell ill the very day we set our sails towards the brave new world of medical banking…so couldn’t coordinate our interview with Metavante, a large financial services firm. We’ll be doing that soon because Metavante offers a superb example of an integrated solution of the future - a platform that processes both financial and health data transactions through a single interface. The firm also acquired a personal health record vendor, so look for more exciting developments to put healthcare online from this firm, that provides IT infrastructure to thousands of banks across America. By the way, Metavante was itself recently acquired by Fidelity National Information Services.

Fortunately I did make a team meeting to organize our Leadership Forum in Oct 2009 at the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health. These are great folks to work with! A key agenda item will be hearing from the national leadership on the “ERA of ARRA” as John Halamka remarked in our last email exchange. For those unfamiliar, John heads the HITSP effort, is CIO at Harvard Medical School and is a great talent who is in Japan for a couple of weeks (click on John’s picture to visit his blog!) How he spearheads the harmonization of multiple industry standards is almost mind-numbing…and still finds time to balance his other activities (like work!). I think John and the HITSP team deserve a lot of credit!

A key point not to overlook in the integration of banking and healthcare platforms is reduction of end-to-end costs for transaction processing. PNC Bank, which has developed a leading industry platform in the medical banking segment, provided a case study at our Medical Banking Institute that showed how one provider with national operations saved $4 million during the first year they used its platform. That’s one of the B2B value points and I hasten to add that according to an independent survey funded by the bank, hospitals will use 66%+ of those savings for indigent/charity care. MBProject’s mission is “to convert digital savings into charitable resources”, and this is a great example of our mission in action.

While that’s very exciting there is more to this story. I believe that the data flowing through new HIPAA-compliant medical banking platforms like the one mentioned above could, with consumer/patient authorization, be routed to requesting online banking consumers who want to track their healthcare spend. New point tools will help consumers to manage their health and wealth through a single, secure portal - their online banking account which is used 3-5 times each week by some 55 million households. This new paradigm creates a win-win-win for the care provider, consumer and bank.

Well, I’m off to bed to get rid of this blasted cold and get back on the trail ASAP!!! Until next post…

Today’s MBProject Members on the Move –

• RMS, a financial services/clearinghouse provider, reports that it received an industry accreditation from EHNAC.
• Benchmark Revenue Management, a revenue cycle analytics firm, reports that it signed a multi-hospital group in Ohio.