After nearly two years of COVID-19 and an unprecedented digital shift in consumer behaviors, the changes and integrations between the health and financial systems have never been greater.
While the free flow of data between healthcare providers, hospitals, insurers and consumers has had dramatic positive impacts on the industry, it has also come with a new set of challenges in terms of keeping both medical records and payment information secure.
“The need to protect data, whether it’s financial or clinical, has certainly never been stronger,” Shannon Burke, senior vice president and general manager, Health Systems at Synchrony, told PYMNTS. Burke also noted the changes COVID-19 has had on the way patients want — and need — to receive care at a time when they can’t always be there in person to get it.
As a result of changing patient and consumer expectations, whether pre-care, point of care or post-care, Burke said the increasingly digitized, frictionless and integrated patient journey has evolved.
“It’s not something that you can separate from the medical journey,” Burke said. “As we look at the whole journey, we have woven so much of financial and medical together, yet one really negative payment experience can absolutely overshadow for a patient any positive clinical outcome.”
What it means is that all of the players need to be really cognizant of how they’re delivering that experience to patients.
Hackers Are Watching
Burke pointed to a recent federal HIPAA report that showed for the 12 months that ended in July 2021, there were 706 reported healthcare data breaches involving 500 or more records — and the healthcare data of over 44 million individuals was exposed or compromised.
“What that’s telling us is that there’s a lot of bad actors, and you kind of have to speculate as to why they’re going after medical information,” she said, adding that bad actors and hackers are clearly not interested in what medications she takes or the time she sprained her ankle.
“They’re going after the health data because it [gives them access to personal and] financial information,” Burke continued, noting how from a security standpoint, the systems have become intertwined.
Her prediction, for this year and next, is that the world will continue to see a drive for truly frictionless integrated, seamless healthcare and financial solutions, as well as continued investment in technology.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t say that billing transparency is going to continue to drive health systems to provide [better] transparency of costs and the costs associated with what the patient is going to bear as their portion,” she said.
As much as she thinks health systems as a whole have “done an outstanding job,” she says there’s always room for improvement.
“I think that, we, as financial partners and financing solutions, are going to need to work with [healthcare providers] to integrate so that it’s just a harmonious part of both a patient experience and the health system care experience,” Burke said.
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