Health Payment Accounts Offer Patients More Options, Less Stress, Zero Interest

Healthcare payment plans are evolving, which is good news for millions struggling with medical debt.

The latest development is the January announcement by healthcare payments platform Paytient that it’s launching a new product — the Health Payment Account (HPA) — which gives consumers access to interest-free payment plans for healthcare expenses using a dedicated Visa card together with the Paytient mobile app.

It’s a process — and product — that’s been gaining converts since 2018 and comes in the wake of last week’s $40.5 million Series B funding round that will help fuel further growth.

“There’s a trillion-dollar challenge of unfunded care in the U.S.” Paytient Co-Founder and CEO Brian Whorley told PYMNTS, noting that the company’s HPA product is purpose-built to help consumers manage these costs.

“Employers, health insurers, they’re mindful, they’re thoughtful, they’re cognizant that paying for care is often the most painful part of the healthcare experience,” he said, adding that the answer is using increasingly familiar interest-free credit and employer-sponsoring “into something that’s very planned, manageable, [and] affordable for you and your family.”

Partnering with Commerce Bank, Paytient pays the expense up-front to providers, and then gets repaid by HPA users according to the flexible payment terms available under the program.

“We bear that expense,” he said, adding that this creates value for the employers sponsoring the program to employees. It also means “there’s a healthcare transaction happening that maybe wouldn’t have otherwise happened,” he said, which drives value for providers and issuing partners.

Read: Paytient Raises $40.5M to Expand Health Payment Accounts Offering

Missionaries, Not Mercenaries

Working with some 700 enterprise partners including Centene, Cigna, Coupe Health, Beta Health, and R.R. Donnelley, Whorley comes off as being on a mission as much as he’s co-founder of a FinTech.

“We like to think of ourselves as missionaries, not mercenaries,” he said. Whorley’s career includes 15 years working in a hospital, where he gained a deeper empathy for consumers struggling not just with the health issues that brought them in, but how to pay for them.

His healthcare experience imparted a deeper empathy for those trying to manage medical debt, whether for costly tests and surgeries or for monthly prescriptions.

Putting the patient at the center of every healthcare interaction is the mission, and he said that mindset yields benefits down the line. “Paytient is a simple product. It’s a Visa card that patients are able to get from their employer or their insurer. You can’t get any closer than in their purse, pocket or wallet on their phone.”

Having this means patients are “pre-equipped” to deal with the payments aspects of unexpected illness and more routine costs, from the occasional urgent care and telehealth visit to prescriptions.

“They’re able to more easily and effortlessly walk in the door with confidence and dignity, being able to swipe that card, pay the provider in full, and then pick a payment plan that works best for them and their family’s budget, always without interest and fees.”

Changing the Healthcare Status Quo

As inflation stays high and there’s a recession on the way or already here, depending on whom you ask, Whorley said more employers are reaching out to Paytient to maximize benefits.

A question he’s getting a lot, for example, is whether Paytient can match employer health plan out-of-pocket maximums to give a larger boost to ailing employees with scant dollars.

He said, “We’re able, for that first-off financial exposure, to try to remove and smooth as much frustration from that experience, then the plan kicks in above that. Fortunately, with the experience we have now across all 700 employers and others, we have the actuarial experience to be able to adequately price that kind of experience … for our employers.”

In the final analysis, Whorley said Paytient is trying to create a more manageable and stress-reducing medical payment plan, but they must operate within the system today, which leaves lots of room for improvement from providers to insurers to FinTechs and, of course, consumers.

“We deal with the world as it is and we come into it and say, ‘How can we make the existing status quo better rather than waiting for someone to do something someday to make it perfect for everyone?’ That day is, you know, far, far off.”