"C.O.M.B.A.T." AIMS AT REDUCING HEALTHCARE COSTS BY HELPING BANKS POSITION NEW SERVICES

Contact: Evelyn Marquez Sanchez
615-794-2009
info@mbproject.org

Franklin, TN (July 7, 2005)  The Medical Banking Project will officially launch an open source project targeting the cross-industry transaction needs of banking and healthcare constituencies at its 2005 Medical Banking Leadership Forum, hosted in Nashville, TN., at the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health. Dubbed C.O.M.B.A.T. for “Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture and Technology”, the mission of the new membership-driven pilot program is “to combat the rising costs of healthcare using medical banking principles and technology.”

“We wanted to implement an open source medical banking project since 1991,” said John Casillas, founder of the Medical Banking Project. “The idea is that this type of project will provide real-world case studies that inform policy, commerce and academia.”

Discussions with open source advocates materialized into an ad-hoc focus group that matured over the past 9 months. A proposed industry architecture presented at the Medical Banking Institute last February by John Hardin, CIO of MedAccessPlus Health Information Network in Manchester, KY and the former chief architect of e-business for General Motors, drew heavy interest by members of MBProject, which includes banks, healthcare providers, health plans, policy groups, IT/consulting firms, large employers and others.

MBProject workgroups will organize around the new initiative and provide issues resolution as the project gets underway. Leaders of the workgroups form a Steering Committee to oversee the program. An advisory board, comprised of liaisons to industry standards groups, and a Secretariat fill out the governance structure.

“Our first objective is to tie together established open source components that support real time administrative and clinical messaging for healthcare,” comments Casillas. “Our targeted pilots – focused on community safety net interactions – will demonstrate how banks can engage the digital transformation in healthcare.”

Members of the Medical Banking Project are rallying around the new initiative. For instance, a new HSA Workgroup at MBProject headed by Dave Harris, partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Healthcare Revenue Cycle Practice (also a featured MBProject columnist under the “Dr. HSA” label), will identify business level requirements for implementing real time financial processes in healthcare, and feed those requirements to the C.O.M.B.A.T. programming subcommittee. ACS’ BP Fulmer, a new member of MBProject who heads the commercial EDI division of the national Medicaid processor, said that “banks are seeking more education in this dynamic area and the C.O.M.B.A.T. initiative will provide practical guidance.”

Tom Dean, CEO of Critical Technologies, Inc., winner of the Project’s “2005 Person of the Year Award” also expressed support. “Clearly banks have a unique position in that they reach over 55 million online banking consumers and nearly all healthcare organizations via bank accounts.” Dean heads the Charity Workgroup at MBProject and is focusing efforts on the first pilots of the C.O.M.B.A.T. architecture, which will bridge community safety net interactions with traditional healthcare settings. The pilots are slated within the states of Tennessee, Delaware and Kentucky.

Casillas says that leveraging existing bank systems that have been rigorously tested against HIPAA requirements, a key early focus of MBProject, will reduce initial and ongoing costs for adopting a national healthcare information infrastructure. He adds that “large employer groups recognize this and that is why they are starting to turn towards MBProject.”

For more information on the C.O.M.B.A.T. Initiative, please visit: http://www.mbproject.org/combat-homepage.php

About the Medical Banking Project...

The Medical Banking Project (a.k.a. “MBProject”) is an independent policy research and strategic advisory firm that facilitates the latent integration of banking technology, infrastructure and credit resources with healthcare administrative operations. The firm coined the term “medical banking™” in 1995 to denote this emerging niche’ industry. It provides educational and workgroup forums and is spearheading two related initiatives: a global, open source software platform (“COMBAT – Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture & Technology™”) to combat rising healthcare costs using medical banking principles and technology and a fee-based, bank-driven community system ("Charitable Communities Network™") that coordinates safety net healthcare access for uninsurable, uninsured and under-insured individuals. The initiatives demonstrate how banks can leverage HIPAA's privacy, security and electronic mandates to deliver substantive cost benefits to care givers, employers an d consumers. For more information, please go to http://www.mbproject.org.

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