LifeWallet Tackles Healthcare Sector’s ‘Antiquated Technologies’

Healthcare reimbursement firm LifeWallet has debuted several upgrades to its system.

The new enhancements, announced in a Wednesday (April 5) press release, include a new portal for healthcare providers, an upgraded mobile application that features a universal intake form, and a kiosk application that uses biometric authentication.

“The healthcare industry is fraught with companies using antiquated technologies that are inefficient and do not interoperate,” said Tokenology Labs CEO Marco De Mello, whose company developed LifeWallet’s new LifeChain portal, in the release. “…We were shocked by the depth of issues rooted in today’s systems used by healthcare payers and providers, ultimately leading to mistakes in record-keeping, improper payments and lower-quality patient care.”

With LifeChain, providers get an “interactive view of tokenized claims status and tracking,” thus streamlining claim management for doctor’s offices, hospitals and clinics. The company, formerly known as MPS Recovery, said in the release that LifeChain is the first platform for fully tokenized claims analysis, able to process more than 1 million medical claims per minute.

The company is making these updates at a time when consumers have come to demand the same ease in healthcare bill payments that they find in retail transactions. That’s led healthcare firms to try to improve their payment options to retain and build their customer base.

PYMNTS’ March collaboration with Corcentric, “Digital Payments: Expanding the Payments Palette,” looked at the payment options healthcare firms support or plan to support. Now averaging almost six payment methods per company, healthcare notably trails finance and insurance when it comes to offering real-time payments.

“The low current acceptance rate of real-time payments marks the start of its consumer-facing offering within the sector, however,” PYMNTS wrote last month. “Healthcare firms’ overall increased payment option acceptance reflects a larger push to meet customer demand — and minimizes the risk of losing them to other providers. Indeed, 92% of healthcare companies not currently investing in real-time payments plan to in the future.”

Meanwhile, more than half of consumers said they’ve experienced difficulties when making healthcare payments, according to “The Digital Platform Promise: How Patients Want to Streamline Healthcare Payments,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration.

Among those consumers, 21% said they found the payment process difficult, 18% were confused by their medical bills, and a respective 8.8% and 6.2% were concerned about the security of their information and lack of preferred payment methods.