MedFICO Will Find Those ‘Most Likely to Pay’: Developer

The Chairman and CEO of Healthcare Analytics told insideARM that the medical payment scoring tool the company is developing will be just as useful to ARM professionals as it will be to hospitals.

“It’s for anyone trying to settle a bill,” Stephen Farber said of the medFICO score being developed with backing from Fair Isaac (“Medical FICO Score to Judge Patient Payment Ability,” Dec. 12). “If you’re a collection agency it will help you know who you’re more likely to collect from. It will help you achieve a settlement sooner, with a higher degree of confidence … and with a lower expenditure of resources.”

Fair Isaac, for-profit hospital operator Tenet Healthcare Corp., and venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners have each invested $10 million in medFICO.

Farber said initial testing of the company’s healthcare scoring tool that judges consumers ability to repay debts will begin next summer. The company expects to have the product available in the fall.

Farber stressed that the Waltham, Mass.-based company is not a credit bureau involved in credit origination. “The tools we are developing are specifically designed for the post-treatment bill process,” he said. “We are focused on helping providers figure out what to do with accounts once they’ve been created.”

Farber said the company is in discussion with 40 different hospital systems, including five for-profit hospitals, about contributing information for the scoring database. Initially, medFICO will only include information from large hospitals with at least $1 billion in revenues because they have more records. Over time, Healthcare Analytics will create ways for smaller hospitals and healthcare providers to contribute information and use the service, he said.

In the meantime, medFICO score will begin to establish an industry standard for the discounts that are applied to patients with balances, Farber said.

“Hospitals lack a tool to determine who is deserving of a discount,” Farber said. “The industry is very anxious to come up with a standardized approach so that the same decision is reached for what is fair and equitable for that patient regardless of the system or state.”