JPMorgan Chase & Co. says a link it plans to establish with a health-payments clearing house should give the New York company's claims-processing service a boost.
"We are enriching the things we can do for our providers, and in many cases, that is very helpful to our insurance clients," said Martha Beard, a senior vice president at JPMorgan Chase and the head of its health-care unit.
JPMorgan Chase announced last month that it had formed a partnership with McKesson Corp. of San Francisco. The two companies plan to connect RelayHealth, the McKesson clearing house that processed more than $780 billion of medical claims last year, with JPMorgan Chase's health-claim processing service.
In an interview after her company announced the partnership, Ms. Beard said that it processes transactions for nine of the top 10 insurance companies in the country, thousands of payers nationwide, and more than 2,000 hospitals.
In January, JPMorgan Chase bought the assets of FisaCure Inc., a Dallas-area provider of such remittance processing.
The company said the goal of the partnership is to increase automation in the revenue processing cycle, from the submission of a claim from the hospital or doctor to the insurer, to the payment and the delivery of a detailed remittance to the provider and an electronic statement to the patient.
Ms. Beard said the two companies also are looking at payments that patients themselves make. "We believe there are more efficiencies to come on that."
