79% of Consumers Want to Pay All Medical Bills From Single Digital Platform

As consumers interact with digital platforms to get their healthcare needs met, they increasingly want these tools to be able to do everything for them, from financing bills to finding providers to investing in their health savings accounts.

For PYMNTS’ study “Healthcare In The Digital Age: Consumers See Unified Platforms As Key To Better Health,” created in collaboration with Lynx, we surveyed a census-balanced panel of census-balanced survey of more than 2,500 U.S. consumers to better understand what they look for in terms of digital platforms to manage their medical services and benefits. The study revealed that, in short, consumers want to have it all.

That is, if consumers had the chance to use a single digital healthcare platform to manage their entire healthcare experience, they would want that platform to be able to do everything. Across all the features that we asked about, the majority of respondents reported that they would prefer their platform to have that capability.

Most in-demand of all features is that consumers, if they could have a single digital platform to manage all of their healthcare activities, would want it to allow them to all types of medical bills, with 79% saying they would want this feature, while only 14% would prefer their platform not have this feature. In second place, 72% of consumers said they would want the platform to offer financing options for medical bills, while only 19% would not want this.

Even the least in-demand feature was still desired by more than half of all survey respondents. Fifty-seven percent of consumers reported that they would want the platform to have the ability to store their bank account information, while only 34% said they would not want this.

Additionally, the majority of consumers would want their sole digital healthcare platform to offer them assistance with finding providers for medical bill financing; would want the ability to store information about their health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA) or health reimbursement arrangement (HRA); would want the ability to store credit card information and would want access to HSA investment options.