Health Industry Develops Medical Credit Score

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 03 Jan 2008 - 8:00 PDT

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The health technology firm Healthcare Analytics is creating a new credit score -- called medFICO -- that would rate an individual's ability to pay medical bills, the McClatchy/Baltimore Sun reports. The score could be introduced as early as this summer in some hospitals. MedFICO would reflect on-time medical bill payments and would include only billing data, not information indicating the reason for treatment. Hospitals would check the score after a patient is discharged to help officials to decide whether a patient can afford to pay bills or whether hospitals should write the debt off as uncollectible.

Development of the score is funded by Fair Isaac, Tenet Healthcare and North Bridge Venture Partners. A sense of the extent of uncollectible bills would help hospitals determine whether to invest in new projects and more accurately balance expenses against gross income, according to McClatchy/Sun.

However, consumer advocates are concerned that the scores might lead lower-income patients with lower scores to receive poorer quality health care than those with higher medFICO scores. Linda Foley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, said, "How much assurance do I have that they're not going to look at this medFICO first, before they decide whether to treat or not?" Consumer advocates also say that given the problems associated with the current Fair Isaac credit score, such as identity theft and inaccurate scoring data, it should not be used as a basis for a medical credit score.

Stephen Farber, chair and CEO of Healthcare Analytics, said, "We only come into play once the patient has been treated and discharged, and the bill already exists," adding, "We help figure out what sort of relief a hospital should grant the patients" (McClatchy/Baltimore Sun, 1/2).

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