The issue a lot of critics are raising is that tools like this one can get misused (nuclear power can create energy in peace or atom bombs for war). This tool is for hospital billers for after the fact but what's to stop a hospital from looking up the score beforehand and not spending as much on treatment of people who probably can't pay? Even with any sort of safeguards they'll probably be circumvented by unscrupulous people :-( But something has to be done to keep costs in control.
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The medFICO score will be calculated based on an individual's medical bill payment history. A database accounting for $100 billion of hospital patient billings will be mined for the effort by Healthcare Analytics.
The medFICO effort has four partners involved: in addition to Fair Isaac and Healthcare Analytics, the IT firm developing the score, are Tenet, the hospital company, and the VC North Bridge Venture Partners. Each of the partners has invested $10 million in medFICO.
To put the provider's problem in context, Tenet calculates that their 63 hospitals had $433 million in bad debt through 3Q07. 75% of the bad debt was from uninsured patients and 25% from patients with deductibles they couldn't or wouldn't pay.
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http://www.healthpopuli.com/2007/12/...-hospital.html