US Bank Launches Banking, Payments Services for Smaller Medical Practices

U.S. Bank says it wants to give smaller medical practices the same financial help as their larger counterparts. 

The bank on Thursday (Sept. 14) announced a program to offer banking, payments and wealth management services for healthcare practices with up to $25 million in yearly revenue.

“While banks have traditionally focused their healthcare services on hospitals and large medical systems, more than 50% of practitioners are in small-to-midsize practices,” U.S. Bank said in a news release.

“These practices need services that will simplify their finances and operations, so their practitioners can spend more time on patients and less time on administrative tasks,” the company added.

According to the release, the bank will add 50 new positions around the country to launch the program, with each client served by a team led by a healthcare banker.

U.S. Bank has also hired Joe Persichetti, a veteran of Huntington National Bank and Bank of America who has spent nearly 20 years dealing with healthcare banking, to lead the program.

The program is happening at a time when players on both sides of the healthcare field need help streamlining the patient experience.

“The Digital Platform Promise: How Patients Want to Streamline Healthcare Payments,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration, examined the embrace of digital payments and other tasks in the previous year.

The study found that innovations such as unified healthcare platforms are helping relieve some of the problems consumers said they frequently run into, from understanding their insurance coverage to paying deductibles. 

“Zooming in on the data, we learned that 21% of consumers found the actual process of paying difficult,” the study said. “Another 18% said that medical bills were confusing in ways that hampered efficient payment, with 13% unable to decipher the costs for specific services and 9% finding inconsistencies between the costs outlined on medical bill statements and those detailed within the online patient portal.”

The launch of U.S. Bank’s small-to-midsized healthcare practice program comes three months after the lender introduced a card, expense and travel management solution designed for middle-market companies.

The new U.S. Bank Commercial Rewards Card also provides rebates for business expenses to companies with yearly revenue of $10 million to $150 million.

“Emerging middle-market businesses have similar needs and opportunities as their larger competitors, but the traditional, complex corporate card and expense solutions weren’t designed for them,” Head of Middle Market Bankcard Product Dan Skaggs said in a news release. 

“That’s why we created a solution tailored for emerging middle-market companies that is easy to implement and includes features many large firms benefit from today.”