Digital Platforms Bring Amazon Effect to Healthcare Payments and Providers

It’s a jungle out there — of healthcare provider and insurance payer portals — and that’s a lot of trouble to go to when accessing a test result or paying a doctor’s bill. It cries for unification.

That’s exactly what’s happening, as the concept of unified healthcare platforms is catching on with consumers, alleviating portal pain points while adding extra layers of data security.

“We’re used to unified platforms in other parts of our lives. We can go to Amazon for all our shipping and purchasing needs, even some of our video needs. I think in healthcare it’s much more fragmented right now,” Tali Goldstein, head of partnerships at FinTech Lynx, told PYMNTS.

She ran through the litany of websites and portals consumers now bounce between, scheduling an appointment here, paying a bill there, but said there’s been no single web destination “to figure out what our insurance covers, what services [are] accessible to me through my plan, through my employer, or anything like that. Today, in healthcare, I would say unified platforms are a goal, but not necessarily a reality,” as is the case in other sectors.

But there’s strong demand for such solutions. According to the study “Healthcare In The Digital Age: Consumers See Unified Platforms As Key To Better Health,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration based on a survey of over 2,500 U.S. consumers, “interest in using a unified digital platform for managing healthcare information and medical insurance benefits is well established among all age groups.”

Lynx is taking a lead in this area with its FinTech-as-a-service for healthcare platform offering. It’s meeting the rising demand for simplified, streamlined digital healthcare experiences.

“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.”

Read: Healthcare In The Digital Age: Consumers See Unified Platforms As Key To Better Health

Curing Payments Pains and More

Payments are a chief complaint when it comes to the tangle of legacy web tools that many, if not most, healthcare organizations still have in place despite three years of living under COVID.

“We see payments as a big pain point in healthcare,” Goldstein said. “Unlike some other industries, in healthcare, the user of a service is often not the payer of that service.”

Due to the intermediary nature of health insurance payments and what consumers owe, she said, “You need many more players at the table to make that end-to-end journey streamlined.”

This is a greenfield opportunity for FinTechs that specialize in API connectivity between disparate systems and data, and healthcare is ground zero for this cumbersome issue.

She said, “If you’re talking about the healthcare plan, the healthcare provider, and the consumer [as] the three entities that need to come to the table to create an end-to-end payment journey, if we’re talking to a client that has one of those three, we can use FinTech to bring the other two to the table and create a sort of streamlined system.”

That thinking informs Lynx’s work in that it replaces the tangle of paper forms, websites, and apps that consumers have become accustomed to with a single source, designed for all.

Convenience is a big selling point of unified healthcare platforms, as is their ability to educate consumers about the right approach to health problems — including payments.

“[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,” she said.

Not only does it increase convenience and personalization, but the unified platform is also a safer way to store and access sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) that’s governed by stringent HIPAA privacy rules.

“The more you can unify that journey, the fewer companies and entities have access to your PHI or PII,” she said, bringing a superior level of data security to bear in this area.

See also: FinTechs Take on Healthcare Payments’ Most Glaring Inefficiencies

Engaging Even to the Least Digital Users

While the appeal of digital healthcare innovations broadly has been quantified for younger digital-first and digital-native demographic groups, Goldstein was struck by the level of interest among sometimes digital-averse older generations uncovered by the study.

“From my experience working with health plans and healthcare providers, we often hear that seniors aren’t interested in managing their health online, and that might be a reason why we’re not investing in the digital experience and the digital care journey,” she said.

“But I think from this survey, you see that seniors and baby boomers are really excited about the potential of a unified health platform to help them manage their journey.”

It makes sense as older cohorts use healthcare at higher rates than younger age groups, and the right mix of content and simplicity could be a game-changer for these consumers especially.

In fact, Goldstein believes that “most of the population is now ready for that digital transition in healthcare, including seniors, which we haven’t seen in the past.”