JPMorgan Chase & Co. is seeking a larger role in health-care payments by buying the assets of FisaCure Inc., a Dallas-area provider of remittance processing services.
The New York company announced Thursday that it has acquired all of FisaCure's assets, primarily its proprietary technology that captures and maps data from paper and electronic sources.
JPMorgan Chase said the assets will become part of the health-care solutions business in its treasury services unit.
Alberto Casas, a vice president at JPMorgan Chase and the leader of its treasury services business-to-business health care unit, said the initial plan for using the FisaCure assets is "an extension of our core capability in lockbox" to automate the processing of payments and remittance information from insurers to the hospitals, doctors' groups, and pharmacies that submit claims for reimbursement.
"The process is still predominantly paper-based, although we've made great strides in the past two years" in promoting electronic transactions, he said in an interview Thursday. "This industry is evolving at a rapid pace. The FisaCure acquisition is positioning us to influence change in the industry."
JPMorgan Chase will work with hospitals, doctors' groups, and other providers to automate their business processes and will encourage both providers and insurers to shift from paper to electronic payment processing, Mr. Casas said.
Founded in 1996, FisaCure has focused exclusively for the past six years on developing remittance management services for health-care providers. It uses optical character recognition technology to extract data from insurers' paper explanation of benefit forms, so the information can be transmitted in an electronic format to providers' patient-accounting systems.
The Carrollton, Tex., company says it has developed a library containing hundreds of payer templates to improve the accuracy of its automated scans, and it has developed applications that automate the processing of electronic insurance claims.
Mr. Casas said FisaCure's applications also automate providers' exception-management processes. Twenty percent of health claims require billing to a second, and sometimes a third, insurer, he said.
The vendor's services also include claim-denial management and a data archive.
FisaCure has worked with JPMorgan Chase for the past year to support its Healthcare Link service for medical claims payment processing, Mr. Casas said.
Employees of FisaCure will join JPMorgan Chase's staff and are expected to remain in their current location in Carrollton, he said.
A spokesman for FisaCure did not respond to a request for comment.
In the future, Mr. Casas said, JPMorgan Chase also could take a role in the electronic transmission of providers' claims and eventually in the adjudication of those claims in real time at the point of service.
"We believe the bank has a role to play throughout the value chain," he said.
