XPost: How healthy is your medical credit score?

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UNDER THE PLAN, HOSPITALS WOULD CHECK PATIENTS' MEDICAL BILL PAYMENT HISTORY AFTER DISCHARGE

Mortgage lenders aren't the only ones showing more interest in your credit score these days - the health industry is creating its own score to judge your ability to pay.

The new medFICO score, which is being designed with the help of credit industry giant Fair Isaac, could debut as early as summer in some hospitals.

Already, the score is raising questions from consumer advocacy groups that fear it will be checked before patients are treated. People with low medical credit scores could receive lower-quality care than those with a healthy medFICO, they argue.

"How much assurance do I have that they're not going to look at this medFICO first, before they decide whether to treat or not?" asked Linda Foley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego.

Stephen Farber, chairman and chief executive of HealthCare Analytics, says that won't happen. Hospitals will check the score, which will be based on the patient's medical bill payment history, only after the patient is discharged, he said.

"We only come into play once the patient has been treated and discharged, and the bill already exists," said Farber, who has visited hospital executives nationwide over the past six months to sell the concept. "We just help figure out what sort of relief a hospital should grant the patient."

HealthCare Analytics, a Waltham, Mass., health technology firm, is developing the score. It is backed by funding from Fair Isaac of Minneapolis; venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners in Massachusetts, and Tenet Healthcare of Dallas. Each kicked in $10 million for the project. In the Bay Area, Tenet operates Community Hospital of Los Gatos and San Ramon Regional Medical Center.

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Yeah, FICOs and mortgage lenders worked so well, let's try it in the healthcare industry.

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1. Comments from watchblog ...

Democrats & Liberals WatchBlog - Read Full Text

The line from Healthcare Analytics' CEO Stephen Farber is that the score will only be used after the patient has been discharged.

Well now…that just doesn't make sense.


If you're taking money from VC and other companies with significant skin in the game then there's a return on that investment that all interested parties want to see. VCs aren’t charitable organizations; they want significant return. ROI needs to come from somewhere and writing off bad debt isn't going to make the VC fund yield a greater return.

Tenet told the Dallas Morning News it had $433 million in bad debts as of the third quarter of this year, one-fourth of it in the form of insurance deductibles patients wouldn’t or couldn’t pay. Since Tenet is putting up $10MM to help fund this system, they, like the VCs, expect return. It's a pipe-dream to think that Tenet's shareholders are going to approve $10MM investment into something to identify writing off bad-debt earlier.


According to a recent interview Farber said: “Hospitals lack a tool to determine who is deserving of a discount. ” (link). That means that this system is designed to produce different pricing models for different patients. It also appears that they will determine the pricing model before the patient is discharged not after.


In the attached article, "Mr. Mooney, of Tenet Healthcare, says the hospital business has changed over the past 30 years to take on characteristics of the retail industry. With patients expected to pay a larger share and do more comparison shopping, they soon will be able to purchase health care much like an automobile, he said." This is crap. Yes, the health care industry has changed its way of doing business and yes they are beholden to their shareholders first and their patients second, but alleging that people will shop from hospital to hospital looking for a deal is absurd. People buy their homes with the knowledge of where the local hospital is with relation to their home. People are not going to compare hospitals when their loved one is lying unconscious on the kitchen floor.

For me, this is just more evidence that we need a socialized health care solution, like the heath care solution that our service men and women get.

When you put a corporation in charge of your health care decisions, people will die; it's guaranteed.