John Casillas

John Casillas founded the Medical Banking Project, a member-driven forum, to research, document and facilitate "medical banking™", a term he coined to denote "the latent integration of banking technology, infrastructure and credit resources with healthcare administrative operations." He is an authority in medical banking subject matter and provides technical assistance to policy makers, banks, healthcare administrators, lawyers and others. He maintains that medical banking will revolutionize healthcare financing and operations and open a new paradigm in the business relationships between banks and healthcare. He actively supports medical banking initiatives for both private and public organizations.

John organized and moderated a 24-month HIPAA Policy Roundtable webcast series featuring national experts and the "HIPAA Gang" that defined national policy issues around the intersection of banks and healthcare in the areas of privacy, security and transactions compliance. He provides technical consultation to commerce and assisted the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Health & Human Services, testified before the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, served as a Commissioner for the Electronic Healthcare Network Accredication Commission (after proposing a new "bank clearinghouse" accreditation that he helped to develop) and was medical banking SME for the Healthcare Financial Management Association. He authored the first HIPAA compliance e-learning module for banks.

John founded the National Medical Banking Institute, an educational arm of the Project, to advance cross-industry understanding of the scope of change made possible by engaging the bank healthcare stakeholder. He established a Leadership Forum (a national medical banking Lab for industry), is editor of The Medical Banking Report and works to create "Charitable Communities Network™ a bank-driven community care platform with a news broadcasting component.

John's work and articles are extensively published in the trade journals, including the Health Data Management, Banking Law Journal, Collections & Credit Risk Magazine, Nasvhille City Paper, Journal for Healthcare Administrative Management, Health Care Law Monthly (LexisNexis), The ADVISOR (International Privacy Officer's Association), the SWACHA website and many others. He has been interviewed by Forbes, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, HIMSS NewsCast, Ingenix, Nashville Business Journal (where he received the 2005 Top Healthcare 100 Award for national influence) and many other media outlets. He has addressed the Federal Reserve Board of Dallas, National HIPAA Summit Conference, Faces of a Healthy Future conference on health disparities, Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, Association for Electronic Healthcare Transactions, LegalTech New York, HIPAA Colloquium at Harvard University, TAWPI, Consumer-Driven Healthcare Conference, HSA Summit and others.

Prior to founding the Project, John started an electronic medical debt trading platform (partially owned by THA Solutions Group, a for-profit subsidiary of the Tennessee Hospital Association); and prior to that, co-founded Realistic Cashflow Management (RCM), a provider of health data management services for mostly Mid-Atlantic academic health centers. In 1992 he led development of a medical remittance IT platform in conjunction with a bank lockbox. A case study was published by Health Data Management.

RCM was acquired by a national bank marketing firm where John assisted development of an IT platform to support medical receivable financing contracts originated through a network of some 1000 community banks. During this time he interviewed over 125 bank officers and hospital CEOs. He felt that, spurred by HIPAA, a new "medical banking" niche industry could emerge. In 1996 he published a newsletter that was distributed to bank holding companies in order to initiate cross-industry dialogue; however, the issue was not prominent. He joined WebMD (ENVOY) in 1997 to direct product strategy. In 1998, he wrote the nation's first White Paper addressing HIPAA's potential impact on banks, widely used by top banks to assess risk.

John graduated in Cytotechnology at Thomas Jefferson University: College of Health Professions located in Philadelphia, PA. He served for five years as president of the Blue Mountain Academy Alumni Association (PA) to help high school students.