Here's a new dandy from FICO ---MedFICO

[Medmech]

70% of the current credit reports contain negative inaccuracies and you imagine how bad they will screw this up?




I’m having a difficult time understanding the purpose of this concept.
MSNBC blog “The Red Tape Chronicles” posted a story about how Fair Issac Corporation is investing $10 million in a Massachusetts startup company named Healthcare Analytics that is developing what amounts to a credit score for healthcare called MedFICO.
The Healthcare Analytics site states that the purpose of this new tool is to “improve a hospital’s financial relationship with patients.”

The average hospital stay is about 5 days; however, the collection period for self-pay balances is typically 6 months or more. HAI’s decision tools will help shorten the process by giving guidance on settlement terms that are equitable, appropriate, and financially manageable for each patient.

I don’t get it. They’re going to use your previous history in paying medical bills to determine how long you get to stay in the hospital? Do people who pay their bills on time get milked for longer hospital stays?
Supposedly, the score would only be used after a patient is discharged from the hospital. A Dallas News article quotes executives from Tenet Healthcare (which also invested $10 million in the Healthcare Analytics startup) as saying that the score “could help them decide whether a given patient can pay his or her bill or if they should just write it off as uncollectible, or a ‘bad debt’ in industry lingo.” Give me a break. This wahoo really wants us to believe that a hospital isn’t going to try to collect from someone just because of a low MedFICO score? Wouldn’t everyone want to have low MedFICO scores, then? Hospitals don’t pay to send someone to collections. If a hospital sends an account to collections, it just pays a percentage of whatever is collected.
The MSNBC post has more than 1600 comments regarding the MedFICO score. Scanning the posts, most people seem put off by the idea. Many seem worried that the score would be used by hospitals to refuse care to patients. I don’t see how implementing such a system will affect a patient’s ability to receive care in a hospital. The hospital can’t discharge you early or refuse you care in the emergency department. The doctors have to make those decisions. Maybe the hospitals would put pressure on the hospitalists to get patients with low MedFICO scores out. Who knows?
Hospitals have the right to make money just like any other corporation, but I don’t think it is ethical or appropriate to charge different people different prices for the same product just because one person has a high MedFICO score and another person has a low MedFICO score. I wonder if this is one of their goals.
I have a few guesses about how this score will really be used:

1. First, if physicians have access to the scoring system, the score may affect the willingness of doctors to accept someone as a patient. Does that mean the patient won’t get care? Probably not. As George Bush said last summer, “you can always go to the emergency room.” (sixteenth paragraph). But if doctors are unwilling to accept someone as a patient for routine medical problems, preventative care goes out the window and the patient is forced to wait until an “emergency” develops to get treated for the problem. Once the “emergency” is averted, the patient waits for another emergency.
2. If the score will be accessible to employers who provide health insurance, it could be used as a tool to cherry pick healthy employees in order to keep insurance costs down. If you have chronic diseases and utilize medical services excessively, who says you can’t be fired for some other reason as a pretense. If the company can access your MedFICO score before they hire you, who says the company has to hire you at all?
3. I’m not sure why hospitals would want the score. I don’t know if it would be used to put pressure on someone who hasn’t paid their bill (”You’ll ruin your MedFICO score if you don’t pay”) or if it would be used to market their services to patients who are likely to be profitable. Good MedFICO score (with lots of medical visits) + good credit score = big bucks for hospital.

Commenters to the MSNBC post noted the potential for identity theft and the possibility that the score could be confused with someone else’s score. These are some of the other down sides to creating such a tool. You can bet that if large corporations are investing tens of millions of dollars to create the score, sooner or later it’s going to be implemented.
Whatever the real reason for its use, the MedFICO score is just one more piece of our privacy that is going to be stripped away.
Other articles about this idea posted at the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and San Jose Mercury News.