Mastercard and HealthLock Team on Reducing Medical Fraud and Billing Errors

Mastercard and HealthLock say they’ve teamed to help consumers avoid medical bill fraud and claim errors.

The partnership, announced Monday (May 22), gives Mastercard health savings account and flexible spending account users access to Healthlock’s platform, which lets them monitor all healthcare claims in one place, prevent fraud, potentially reduce bills and reverse rejected claims.

Ajay Bhalla, president, cyber and intelligence at Mastercard, said the partnership gives cardholders “the knowledge that their medical data is safeguarded, and their healthcare payments and claims are accurate and secure.”

According to the release, the HealthLock platform lets consumers audit every medical insurance claim and organize them on a single dashboard. Scott Speranza, the platform’s CEO, said that’s good news at a time when the health system is growing more complex and error-ridden.

“For the last 10 years, our mission has been to make healthcare simpler and more secure,” Speranza said. “This partnership with Mastercard enables HealthLock to ensure millions more people don’t have to pay more than their fair share.”

The partnership comes amid increased desire among consumers for a unified digital healthcare platform that includes access to insurance information, pharmacy services, appointment scheduling and check-ins and access to provider web portals, as PYMNTS wrote last week.

As part of a broader retailer venture into healthcare, grocery giant Albertsons in February debuted Sincerely Health, a health and wellness platform that lets users link their healthcare wearables and activity trackers and log vital signs and integrate medication schedules.

In addition, it offers a telehealth portal to connect users with general practitioners. It’s among the closest thing to a unified platform on the market, but still falls far short of what research by PYMNTS and Lynx shows consumers demand.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Lynx’s head of partnerships, Tali Goldstein, explained why the FinTech that successfully comes up with a unified healthcare platform may have a runaway winner on their hands.

“I think that consumers are really looking for this,” Goldstein said. “Those who have read through the report will have seen that consumers know this is something missing in their healthcare journeys. They know that a unified platform could theoretically step in to help them manage [many] aspects of their care journey and their family’s care journey. … [A unified platform] can not only educate on what the best next step is in that journey, but even start to guide and say, this is the service I would use now, and this is how I would pay for that service.”