Some of the most complex issues in healthcare today involve healthcare payments, and Philadelphia’s InstaMed is working to address these issues.
InstaMed’s President and CEO Bill Marvin co-founded the Philadelphia company in 2004. He says, “InstaMed provides financial services that streamline healthcare payment processes for healthcare providers such as health systems and doctors; health insurance companies, also known as healthcare payers; and patients.”
The company provides credit, debit, and payment services to healthcare providers. It also offers clearinghouse services, taking medical claims and transmitting them electronically, as well as eligibility transactions, validating whether a patient is an up-to-date member of a particular health plan.
Marvin started InstaMed in his condo, and today the company operates from an office in downtown Center City next to the new Comcast Center, a skyscraper scheduled for completion in March 2008 that is already the tallest building in Philadelphia. InstaMed’s impressive new Center City digs are appropriate for this fast-growing company. Marvin says, “We were founded in 2004, did our first transaction with a single doctor in July 2005, and installed our first health-system customer in February 2007. Today, we have more than 30,000 healthcare providers processing healthcare payment transactions with us.”
Marvin attributes his company’s growth to the complexity of the healthcare payment process. This complexity stems, in part, from the fact that healthcare is highly regulated. Health information falls under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires compliance with national standards for electronic healthcare transactions and which mandates security and privacy for health data.
“HIPAA has done a lot of good,” he says, “but it has scared off a lot of banks that are hesitant to participate in healthcare payments because of the regulatory nature of HIPAA.” What makes InstaMed unique is that the company and its technology platform were created to be HIPAA-compliant, and to be payment-, banking-, and financial services–compliant. Marvin says, “We deploy sophisticated technology for real-time processing, and we serve a need for and deliver a seamless, transparent, and hassle-free process.”
What’s great about the Philadelphia region, Marvin says, is the number of people in both the workforce and graduating from the universities who understand life sciences and healthcare. He concludes, “The opportunities that we see just keep getting bigger. There’s great momentum in the life sciences industry in this region, and we can only see it increasing in the future.”