Headlines:
LaSalle Developing Health-Care Services
LaSalle Bank Corp. is poised to launch a "payments clearing house" using corporate lockbox with image capabilities, to process the complex payments of the health care industry.
The Chicago subsidiary of ABN Amro Holding NV plans to develop "a new portfolio of treasury management services" around the technology, said Cindy Murray, an executive vice president at LaSalle and the director of its treasury management group.
LaSalle is pilot testing the technology with several large hospitals around the country and plans a broader introduction next month, Ms. Murray said. Target markets include large and small hospitals, medical group practices, and specialized medical service providers.
"We consider this a national product," she said.
LaSalle provides the payment processing for the venture and has formed a partnership with Medical Banking Exchange LLC, an Oklahoma City unit of Marshall & Ilsley Corp., to transmit the complex remittance information, including the health forms, to the providers.
Nav Ranajee, a vice president in LaSalle's treasury management business strategies unit, said it wants to take advantage of the standardized forms required in the medical industry under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
"We do see this market becoming more electronic, and we are positioning ourselves there," he said.
Ms. Murray said LaSalle will accept both paper and electronic payments. "We're totally indifferent how we clear the check itself."
Future plans call for development of a module to automate secondary billing, and one to improve providers' ability to resubmit claims that insurers reject.
Mr. Ranajee said he envisions the evolution of a "liquidity marketplace" for the medical industry, where investors could bid on health-care receivables, but that's a long-term plan. "It's factoring," he said, referring to a traditional form of receivables financing.
Northern Trust of Ill. Using Oblix Software
Northern Trust Corp. is replacing a homegrown network security system with vendor software, to help keep up with changes in how businesses access their data.
The Chicago banking company is installing COREid identity management software from Oblix Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., for user authentication and authorization.
"This will help keep us current with new technology as it evolves," said Robert Schwarz, Northern Trust's manager of enterprise application architecture.
Today the bank's employees access about half a dozen internal applications through Oblix, and Northern Trust anticipates adding six or seven more this year.
Northern Trust developed its own security system that enables users to access a variety of computer applications with a single sign-on, but with the advent of technologies that allow automated access, "it was becoming problematic to support" the security system, Mr. Schwarz said. "The security space outside the bank was changing very rapidly."
Executives decided in the first half of 2002 to look at vendor software. They selected Oblix after looking at a number of competitors. Northern Trust employees started using the software in December 2003 to access a human resources application.
By the end of next year, he estimated, a majority of the company's 75 individual Web applications will be converted. In the meantime, the two security systems are connected to each other, so that users still need to sign on only once.
"The structure is in place from an enterprise perspective," said Audra Lind, the manager of Northern Trust's infrastructure architecture development and support unit. "We implement it as if every application is using it already."
