Corrections or additions?
Onehealthbank.com
You fly to Los Angeles for a business meeting, and
for three weeks afterward you wrangle with the airline, the FAA, and
your employer about what the flight should cost — how much you
should pay for meals, fuel, aircraft maintenance, crew salaries, and
hangar rental. Or the flight attendant informs you that because you
bought your ticket at “this agency” instead of “that agency,”
you may not board the plane.
Does this sound ridiculous? Of course, but it is pretty much the healthcare
model. If you are not in an HMO and your doctor suggests an operation,
you have no idea what it will really cost. You get bills from the
surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the radiology department, the radiologist,
and the hospital. Some of the cost is picked up by insurance, but
some is not. You don’t know how much you must pay until weeks or months
later. And if you have an HMO, you may not qualify for the operation
at all.
Bookkeeping costs eat up an enormous percentage of the healthcare
dollar in the United States, but a company based on Princeton-Hightstown
Road has been working quietly for two years to change the paradigm.
Onehealthbank.com aims to efficiently and cost-effectively process
medical claims and payment information using the Internet. It plans
to do alpha tests this fall, beta tests next year, and may float an
initial public offering in the midst of the beta tests.
Using the power of the Visa payment system, onehealthbank.com will
consolidate all the information from the three parties involved —
the healthcare provider (the doctor and the hospital), the insurance
company (the payer), and the consumer (the patient). “We connect
the doctors, patients, and the payers,” says W. Edward Hammersla,
CEO of onehealthbank.com. “Two of these participants are present
at the point of care — one is absent. Our system uses the Internet
to make the payer present at the point of care.”
Think of it. Your doctor says you need an operation and enters some
information into the computer — where the operation will take
place and your choice — if any — of the procedures. You swipe
your VISA card and then you gain the following:
The total bill for each of the procedures offered.What your insurance would pay and what your part of thebill would be.The ability to put the bill on your VISA card or chooseanother payment option (see below).”Rebates” similar to airline miles, which couldbe “points” off your out-of-pocket expenses (co-pays and deductibles).It will be a cold day in the Sahara, you say, when billing isthat easy. But Hammersla has been working on a “stealth” basiswith a variety of payers and providers. “It is very much a collaborativeeffort. We will consolidate the transactions and synchronize the paymentswith the legacy databases of the payers,” says Hammersla.”In a simple way, all we are doing is outsourcing the payers’payment system to Visa,” he says. “It is as if we have saidto the payer, `Look, you may be really good at healthcare, but youare not so great at making payments so why not turn over your paymentsystem to VISA and go back to improving healthcare.'”Hammersla and Dean Boyer, the founders, have each had 22 years insoftware development. Hammersla was an only child, and his fatherwas a research scientist at Bell Labs; the family lived around theworld. After going to boarding school in St. Louis, he studied businessadministration and Palestinian archaeology at Illinois-based PrincipiaCollege, Class of 1976. He worked for IBM, NEC, and such softwarecompanies as International Customer Solutions, KnowledgeWare, SterlingSoftware, and Informix Software. His clients have included the federalgovernment, Starbucks Coffee, Dell Computer, NYNEX, Lillian Vernon,Lenox, Sassoon, and Arena Sportswear.An alumnus of Elizabethtown College, Class of 1979, Dean Boyer hada career as a minor league baseball player. He is nationally knownfor his work in collecting, correlating, and analyzing enormous volumesof data. His clients have included the Federal Reserve Bank, AmericanAirlines, and the Bank of New York, where he improved the flexibilityand responsiveness of businesses that process more than 4 milliontransactions daily.He had worked at Logic Works, the database software company that spawnedentrepreneurs who founded such companies as TV Objects, Lapjack andPaytrust.com. He cofounded onehealthbank.com in 1996 and as chiefknowledge officer has filed patents on payment system software thatcan access pricing modules.”Our software has the capability to know both the patient andpayer responsibility and have that at the point of care,” saysHammersla. “That is what happens for airlines when the customeris accessing pricing modules.”Some of the payment options are to use the Visa as acredit card, as a debit card, or as merely a statement card. Withthis scenario, the card would pay for the insurance company’s portionand the consumer would get a combined statement, with all the chargeson it — hospital, doctor, anesthesiologist, and so on — sothe consumer would have to pay only one bill.A fourth option is to use the card as a repository for a “flexiblespending account” provided by the employer. These plans allowa consumer to estimate annual out-of-pocket expense for health careand pay for it with pre-tax dollars. “Many times employees don’twant these accounts because if they don’t use the dollars they losethem — and because they are a hassle. Now it will be more convenient.You will get a monthly statement and you will see how much is leftover — and use your monthly statements to do annual planning forthe next year.”Boyer and Hammersla predict that their service will be the next “killerap” for the health world, where the market is immense. VISA isprocessing $10 billion in healthcare transactions annually, but thisrepresents just 1 percent of all the healthcare dollars. If you figurethat VISA has a 12 percent share in other categories worldwide, VISAcould reasonably hope to process 12 times the current total of healthcarebills or $120 billion.”We started working with VISA because it pioneered in the healthcare space in 1990, but our system is an open system,” says Hammersla.Just as airlines co-brand with various credit cards, his VISA cardcould be co-branded by any of the insurance companies, for instanceAetna/Citibank or Cigna/Chase. “All of the cards could be usedin conjunction with our settlement system.”Security is an issue, but because credit cards are regulated by banks,guidelines will be strict. “We are beyond the highest level ofcommercial security,” says Hammersla. For this reason they locatedthe firm in an unpretentious building across the street from the formerRCA/GE aerospace center. Rumor has it that the FBI manned a counterintelligence outpost there when satellites were being made, and sothis building is wired to the gills. “In the Internet world, goodwiring counts for more than a sleek headquarters,” says Hammersla.”No matter how long you believe it will take,” says Hammersla,”we know the healthcare industry will eventually be ableto do point of service settlement. Every other industry in Americadoes so. It will be on the Internet, and a plastic payment card (probablyVisa or MasterCard) will be the consumer’s favorite method of choicefor making payments.”Growing quickly is one challenge. “The strategy is to grow itthrough partnership and clients. We don’t envision hiring sales peopleand knocking on people’s doors. Instead, we would co-brand with variouslarger healthcare insurance payers. They will roll it out as theirprogram.””We are doing something innovative, and the hurdles will be unpredictable,but we have been in the space since 1995, and we have yet to see anybodyattack this exactly the way we are. Others may do something similarbut we have differentiators that are exciting. It is a challenge andan opportunity.”onehealthbank.com, 379 Princeton-HightstownRoad, Building 2, Cranbury 08512. W. Edward Hammersla III, presidentand CEO. 609-371-3000; fax, 609-371-3001. Home page: https://www.ohb.com.— Barbara Figge FoxTop Of PageCrosstown MovesBlock Drug Company, 2 Charles Court, Dayton 08810.609-655-1123. Home page: https://www.blockdrug.com.The dental products manufacturer is selling its 133,000-foot buildingat 2 Charles Court and will move 150 workers to another site in Dayton,131 Docks Corner Road. The Garibaldi Group is marketing the property.VLSI Technology, 101 College Road, Anita Letzter,sales manager. 609-799-5700; fax, 609-799-5720. Home page: https://www.vlsi.com.The sales and engineering office for VLSI is in temporary space nowbut plans a move to 4,700 feet at 2 Research Way. The San Jose, California,firm designs integrated circuits and has been sold to Philips.Top Of PageDown-SizingGlobal Financial Corp., 4 Cedar Brook Drive North,Cranbury 08512. 609-860-1919; fax, 609-860-0404.The telephone listed for this business is now recorded, in directoryassistance records, as being located at 202 West State Street in Trenton.But the telephone is disconnected. The firm was founded in 1995 tofund equipment leases.Top Of PageNew in TownBryant Staffing, 200 Buckelew Avenue, Suite C JamesburgCommons, Jamesburg 08831. Desiree Rossiter, branch manager. 732-605-1471;fax, 732-605-1450.The employment agency will open this office on October 4 but willkeep its office in Piscataway as well. It provides office and lightindustrial workers, temporary, permanent, and temp to perm.RMH Teleservices, 1556 North Olden Avenue, Ewing08638. Kevin Washington, general manager. 609-392-0511; fax, 609-392-3124.The Bryn Mawr-based telemarketing firm expanded from 14,000 to 27,340square feet at this building owned by Levin Properties. Karen Andersonand Charles Segal of Stephen M. Segal represented the landlord.The firm does inbound and outbound calls for Fortune 500 firms insuch areas as insurance, credit card acquisitions, and credit cardbalance transfers. Its grand opening is scheduled for November.The state of the art work stations include smoking and nonsmokingbreak rooms, and a predictive dialing system, with a processor thatsenses when a live person is on the line and sends only those callsto the telemarketers.Top Of PageContracts AwardedHamilton Township, 2090 Greenwood Avenue, Hamilton08650. 609-890-3500; fax, 609-890-3537.Both Plainsboro and Hamilton townships will be able to process passportapplications in late September. Princeton Borough and Lawrence Townshipalso provide this service.The Liposome Company Inc. (LIPO), 1 Research Way,Princeton 08540-6619. Charles A. Baker, chairman and CEO. 609-452-7060;fax, 609-452-1890. Home page: https://www.lipo.com.ABELCET has received marketing approval for a 50 milligram injectionvial, particularly for pediatric patients. The company develops advancedliposomal drugs for the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases.ABELCET is a lipid-based formula of Amphotericin, which treats severefungal infections, including a type of meningitis, that destroy immunesystems that have been compromised — often as a result of chemotherapyfor cancer, treatment for bone marrow, or solid organ transplantation.But the standard Amphotericin B has the potential to cause kidneytoxicity, whereas ABELCET does not. ABELCET has been approved foruse in 23 countries.Top Of PageDeathKaren Miller, 43, died September 2. She was a graphicartist with U.S. 1 Newspaper. See page 4.Corrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
