Healthcare industry

Lenders are concerned that the coronavirus outbreak will increase vacancies and add to credit risk.

Even though health care payment providers have more digital payment options than ever, there still is a tough hurdle to overcome: Patients don't always trust the medical provider or insurance company to provide accurate bills.

Install payments and other financing options can offset the cost of health care, says InstaMed's Chris Seib.

The health care payments market is big – accounting for over one in six dollars of the U.S. GDP – yet it remains perpetually outdated with its heavy reliance on using paper statements for sending out bills.

"Watch what customers do, not what they say," said Melissa Smith, president and CEO of WEX.

Financial institutions have different levels of breach protection than health care, heightening the risk, according to Brad Keller, senior vice president and program director at Shared Assessments.

Highland Associates has $26 billion in assets under management on behalf of not-for-profit medical endowments and foundations. Regions Financial is following the lead of other regionals, which have been scooping up investment firms that specialize in health care.

JPMorgan Chase is buying InstaMed, a cloud-based health care payments platform that’s seen significant growth in recent years from consumer medical payments.

Women are being driven from high-technology jobs by lingering male-dominated culture, and Christine Lee is calling on colleagues with high-profile positions to take responsibility for changing that.

Over five years as CEO of WEX, Melissa Smith has led the international corporate payments company through several quarters of growth through organic expansion and acquisitions. One of her signature moves is the artful use of partnerships to extend WEX’s payments technology in the fuel card, health care and travel sectors.

In sectors such as health care and B2B, digital communication is rapidly shoving paper processes to the side, according to David Yohe, vice president of marketing at BillingTree.

Blockchain technology can make it easier to validate a patient's HSA information, for example — helping speed along the process despite the traditional data validation hurdle they may face otherwise in this situation, writes Bruce Silcoff, CEO of Shyft Network.

To bridge the skill gap in this area, universities all over the world are working with private companies to provide blockchain-related training programs, according to Donika Kraeva, strategic communications manager at Dentacoin.

Blockchain technology has the potential to change the healthcare industry, placing the patient, at the center of the system by providing added security, privacy and interoperability to health data and payments, writes Donika Kraeva, strategic communications manager for Dentacoin.

Health care's a vertical that keeps coming up over and over as a laggard that sticks to paper, manual forms and other legacy payment methods, mostly because of the number of documents that would need to be digitized for even one part of the process to enter the modern age.

Blockchain provides greater data management tools and improved connections between insurance payments and medical care, says Jeremias Grenzebach, co-founder and core developer at Dentacoin Foundation.

The expansion of Visa Direct is designed to speed disbursements for health care patients who can receive an instant payment versus waiting several days to a week for payout.

If the company they plan to establish comes together and works — still a big if — it could give JPMorgan an edge in competing with other banks, lead to innovative payments and other products and create unforeseen issues.

OnPlan serves the education and health care industries, and under Flywire its services will be available for the first time outside the U.S.

When taken in the context of the complete invoice and payment cycle, manual payments not only have higher processing costs to the provider and supplier, but also result in delays between processing and making payments, writes Darci Guerrein, vice president of payment operations for GHX.