We Still Have Much To Learn From The Banking Industry

For most of my career, I have been one of those annoying nags pointing out over and over how large the gap between financial services technology and healthcare is. Like many others in the healthcare IT industry, I still feel a twinge of annoyance when I reflect upon how hard it still is to get healthcare information versus how easy it is to take my money out of a bank using an ATM.

The gap has only grown larger over the last decade or two. As the rate things are going, financial IT will run rings around us in the healthcare field for some time to come. While we struggle still to share data amongst healthcare organizations, financial institutions are steadily moving to models which bring multiple financial sources to a single consumer portal and deliver neatly packaged data.

Admittedly, the drive to make financial data more useful and accessible — particularly to consumers — doesn’t seem to be driven by the big organizations themselves. While the solutions are often white-labeled, if you look closely you’ll see that fintech intermediaries are springing up which deliver our consumer interfaces to multiple financial institutions.

Still, even if intermediaries are getting the job done, it’s getting done. For example, I’ve begun to see impressive levels of integration with various financial organizations featured in new budgeting and financial tools. While banks and other financial entities aren’t fully integrated with these tools, the extent to which they even present this data is impressive.

Not only that, now that banks have realized they can do this effectively I expect to see more of this occur on their internal portals as well. For example, the bank I use most has done a very elegant job of integrating my credit card and banking data in a usable, powerful format. This interface makes it easy not only to know my financial status but to make decisions about it as well. I’d practically kill for a healthcare interface that simplified my interactions with providers that much.

Not only that, financial institutions are putting together bundles of services that offer consumers simple access to handy data and apps. One of the best examples I can think of is the way Intuit makes web budgeting tool Mint, QuickBooks and TurboTax available through a single sign-on.

If healthcare providers could offer something comparable, integrating, say access to medical records, a user-friendly bill payment and healthcare expense management tool and apps that made working with providers truly easy, it would be amazing, right? However, unlike Intuit and its peers, which have been building horizontal integration structures for decades, healthcare systems aren’t architected that way, and I don’t know if it’s even possible to do this over the short term.

A girl can dream though. A girl can dream.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • I love your articles. You touched a basic understanding of medical IT. Billing is a horisontal architecture. Medical records are VERTICAL. Patient Mediated Interoperability.

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