Onehealthbank.com

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Prepared for August 16, 2000 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All

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Under the Internet Bubble, Some Apps Flourish

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Onehealthbank.com

Most industries — the hotel, the retail, and the

airline industries, for instance — operate at an efficiency level

of more than 95 percent. Healthcare delivery, in contrast, operates

at 75 percent efficiency. Only about 75 percent of your doctor and

hospital costs go to keeping you healthy, and the rest goes down the

Great Billing Drain.

Onehealthbank.com has been working in stealth mode for four years

on systems to efficiently and cost-effectively process medical claims

and payment information on the Internet. It aims to connect the

insurance

company, the credit card company, and the healthcare providers. For

instance, when you need an operation and your doctor enters

information

into the computer, you merely swipe your credit card and get the total

bill for each of the procedures offered, what your insurance would

pay, and what your part of the bill would be. You could put the bill

on your credit card right then and there or choose another payment

option.

Now occupying 7,000 square feet on one floor at Princeton Windsor

Office Park, onehealthbank.com plans a September 22 move to 20,000

square feet at Building 400 of Windsor Corporate Park. It has grown

from a dozen employees last year to nearly 40 full-time employers

plus 10 onsite and five off-site contractors, and it will be the very

first tenant at the former Lockheed-Martin plant.

"We are focused on getting the product live this fall," says

Bruce Elder, senior vice president. "We have signed customer

relationships to make

that happen and are doing point of service settlement, paid in real

time over the Internet."

"Our business plan has been refined," says Elder, who expects

to announce major investors and partners in several weeks. But he

is making no predictions about an IPO, saying only that it will depend

on revenue and market factors.

In a major reorganization, one of the co-founders, W.

Edward Hammersla III, left this spring. Joseph Sebastianelli is now

chairman, CEO, and president. Sebastianelli was co-president of U.S.

Healthcare and was instrumental in that company’s merger with Aetna

Inc., where he then held the office of president. He came to Princeton

from being CEO of Scripps Care, San Diego’s largest healthcare system,

and he has also been vice president of Blue Cross of Greater

Philadelphia

and a litigation associate with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

Reporting to him is a four-person team including co-founder Dean

Boyer,

who runs the technology side of the business. An alumnus of

Elizabethtown

College, Class of 1979, Dean Boyer had a career as a minor league

baseball player. He is nationally known for his work in collecting,

correlating, and analyzing enormous volumes of data. His clients have

included the Federal Reserve Bank, American Airlines, and the Bank

of New York, and he had worked at Logic Works, the database software

company that has spawned several other successful new companies. He

cofounded onehealthbank.com in 1996 and has filed patents on payment

system software that can access pricing modules.

Hal Knight is the CFO, Rich Heilman is senior vice president for

banking

relations, and Bruce Elder is in charge of sales and marketing. Elder,

a 1985 alumnus of the University of Minnesota, was director of the

healthcare business for Sun Microsystems and moved here from San

Francisco

with his wife, a native of Budapest. As a web-based technology

company,

self designed and managed, onehealthbank uses Sun Microsystems Unix

servers with some Windows NT PCs for the environment. Though it now

hosts its own servers for development and production, it expects to

contract with an Internet data server soon. It supports two database

platforms — DB2 and Oracle — so that it can accommodate all

its customers. Onehealthbank has its own security architecture, using

SSL (security sockets layer) technology for encryption and is

investigating

PKI (public key infrastructure).

Jerry Fennelly represented the tenant and Bernie McNamee and Pete

Corcoran at GMH represented the owners. Office Interiors is doing

the cubicle office space buildout for the two thirds of the workers

who are technical employees, and some rewiring is being done. Larry

Crisman, a recruiting consultant, works onsite. A public relations

firm, Corporate Communications, is doing some press releases.

"Our new location is just what we wanted, less than a 1/4 mile

away, in the same township. We have relatively easy access to

Princeton

Junction train station. By not having to change geographic locations,

we can use the same phone numbers and it does not change anyone’s

commute," says Cy Nicholas Aures, vice president of finance and

controller. "One of the things we like is being able to recruit

local talent, and we will be moving into a class A facility, the first

company in the office park."

— Barbara Fox