Medical Credit Reports In The Making
Jan 18th, 2008 at 9:22 pm by Susie
Oh, what fun. Let’s see, there’s the time the company that laid me off cut my insurance coverage THREE WEEKS before the date in my separation agreement, causing me to be dunned for a $6000 stress test that’s still on my credit record. Then there’s the root canal my dental insurer insisted was covered (done the day before I was laid off from yet another job) but the dentist office kept insisting was rejected - six phone calls and several hours later, that one’s probably on my credit report, too.
Then there was the MRI that the hospital kept billing to my previous insurer, even though I’d given them the new policy information…
Oh yeah. This will be fun:
The folks who invented the credit score for lenders are hard at work developing a similar tool for hospitals and other health care providers.
The project, dubbed “MedFICO” in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient’s ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive.
Fair Issac Corp., developer of the FICO credit score, is one of several investors in Healthcare Analytics, the Massachusetts start-up that is developing the hospital risk tool. Another investor is Tenet Healthcare Corp, one of the nation’s largest hospital operators. Stephen Farber, who resigned as chief financial officer of Tenet in 2004, is the CEO of Healthcare Analytics.
Several published reports have described Healthcare Analytics product as a MedFICO score, computed in a way that would be familiar to those who’ve used credit scores. The firm is gathering payment history information from large hospitals around the country, according to a magazine called Inside ARM, aimed at “accounts receivable management” professionals. It will then analyze that data to predict how likely patients will be to pay future medical bills. As with credit reports and scores, patients who’ve failed to pay past bills will be deemed less likely to pay future bills.
The idea sounds ominous to Pam Dixon, who runs the World Privacy Forum, which studies medical privacy issues.
“This is a bad idea and I don’t think this benefits the consumer at all,” Dixon said. “And what about victims of medical ID theft? Are we going to deny treatment to these people because they have a terrible MedFICO score?”
This is scary and the CEO of the company was forced out of his job at Tenet when they got caught playing games with Medicare billing that resulted in big fines. So you know with a track record like that he’s completely trustworthy and honest as the day is long.
Many years ago, working for a bank, I was reviewing credit applications with their credit reports. For people from one area north of us, it was quite common to see three, four or five collection accounts from one particular hospital. It seems they sent everything into collections that wasn’t paid immediately, including the ones covered by insurance that would be paid. My boss, who was familiar with the hospital, told me to ignore anything with the hospital name on it. I have since wondered what happened to people’s credit when mergers sent their credit reviews to far away places where no one knew about this habit.
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[...] Medical Credit Reports In The Making Several published reports have described Healthcare Analytics product as a MedFICO score, computed in a way that would be familiar to those who’ve used credit scores. The firm is gathering payment history information from large … [...]