Hospitals across the country are moving to electronic medical records, some with the help of stimulus money. Most experts agree the change will improve care. One Wisconsin business says technology shouldn’t stop with medical records. LaserNet is helping hospitals move from snail mail billing to electronic bill pay. WUWM’s LaToya Dennis has more.
If you’re anything like me, you probably use the Internet for everything—last minute birthday gifts, picking the perfect vacation spot and paying bills. Research shows that around 48 million U.S. households use the Internet to make payments. That might lead you to think the online option is commonplace in every industry, right? Wrong. Ane Ohm is president of a document delivery company based in Green Bay.
“The reality is, is that hospital systems have been so focused on electronic medical records that they haven’t had time to follow that up with the online billing availability that you’ve come to expect in just about any other industry,” Ohm says.
Enter Ohm’s company, LaserNet. Back in 2007, it started work on something called the TransData 360. It allows hospital patients to view their most up-to-date bills online and make payments. Ohm says the software can also consolidate invoices.
“I had a recent experience with my son. He had tubes put in his ears and so you go to a hospital, you go to a clinic, he had went to a surgery center to have the tubes put in his ears. Each one of those locations, even though it’s all part of the same system, each location sends me a different invoice,” Ohm says. Ohm says receiving several bills from hospitals and clinics within the same system can lead to a lot of confusion.
“Just when you think you’ve paid everything, you haven’t,” Ohm says.
“Sometimes if you were really sick it’s very tough during that recovery period,” Miller says.
Bruce Miller created the billing software. He knows from experience with heart surgery, how stressful it can be dealing with hospitals when it comes to making payments.
“While you’re trying to go through all of that, with all the emotion and all the physical pain and all that other stuff, you start getting these statements from the hospital and now it’s telling you how much it costs,” Miller says.
Miller says after his surgery, his wife went back and forth for months with the hospital about the bills. He says his goal was to make life easier after the hospital. But easier doesn’t always mean better, according to Pam Dixon. She’s executive director of the privacy advocacy group World Privacy Forum. She’s grown concerned over the way medical billing and medical records are sometimes becoming entangled.
“Let’s say that you had a broken leg three years ago. The code for a broken leg would show up in your electronic health care record in some of these pilot projects. In a perfect world this would make all the sense. But for people who are victims of identity theft or specifically medical identity theft their insurance codes can be completely wrong. And this can lead to inappropriate or improper treatment,” Dixon says.
Dixon says before signing up for online bill pay, you need to be sure organizations are not using bill payment information as part of your medical records. Jeff Hampton heads up the billing department for Bellin Health. It’s one of two hospitals using LaserNet’s TransData 360 right now. Hampton says even without 100 percent buy in, his organization is still saving money.
“The consolidated payment process has reduced the number of statements that we send out by 30 percent,” Hampton says.
Hampton won’t say how much Bellin is paying for the service. But he does say online bill pay is helping get the payments in more quickly. With more people footing more of their medical costs, systems like the TransData 360 make taking care of debts easier. What consumers and hospitals have to decide, is whether the technology meets their desires for privacy.
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