The business of paying for healthcare hasn’t been taking care of itself as an industry when it comes to joining the connected economy — or even taking precursory steps to do so. But that’s changing fast.
As it did in so many other areas, the pandemic cast a somewhat harsh spotlight on how antiquated the system is — and the problems that it causes. Recognizing that banking customers in the healthcare space were feeling pain from the disconnect, Bank of America acquired Axia Technologies (AxiaMed was the marketing name) and the marketing name is now Healthcare Payment Solutions.
Healthcare Payment Solutions co-founder Kevin Kidd is now senior vice president and executive lead, healthcare strategy at the nation’s second-largest bank, where he’s helping lead the charge to modernize healthcare payments.
Seeing inefficiencies everywhere in his past life as a lawyer with healthcare providers and healthcare IT clients, Kidd told Karen Webster, “That was the birth of the initial business idea for Healthcare Payment Solutions. What I saw was the fact that the healthcare providers were using healthcare software systems that often didn’t have good consumer payment technologies built in. There are a lot of reasons for that. Healthcare is typically slow to adopt new technologies. It also can be slow with adopting new processes.”
Like the proverbial frog sitting unaware in a pot set to boil, the problems arose almost imperceptibly over decades as more health cost obligations were shifted to patients.