NextUp: How InstaMed Is Making Healthcare Payments More Efficient
Acquired by JPMorgan Chase for more than $500 million earlier this year, the local tech company could become the standard for medical billing and payments.
The founders of InstaMed, Chris Seib and Bill Marvin.
“NextUp” is a weekly NextHealth PHL feature that highlights the local leaders, organizations and research shaping the Greater Philadelphia region’s life sciences ecosystem. Email qmuse@phillymag.com with pitches for NextUp.
Who: For millions of Americans, the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a federal overhaul to Medicare that created Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), meant having the ability to set aside money on a pre-tax basis to pay for qualified medical expenses like deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance. For Bill Marvin and Chris Seib, the act represented the beginning of a shift towards higher payment responsibility for patients, and an opportunity to build the infrastructure the healthcare economy would need to support that shift.
A year after HSAs were introduced in 2004, Marvin and Seib founded InstaMed with hopes of simplifying the entire healthcare payments process for providers, payers and consumers. The company now has offices in Philadelphia and Newport Beach, California – the hometowns of the company’s two founders. Two-thirds of InstaMed’s more than 300-person workforce are employed at the Philadelphia headquarters.
What: Medical billing is often a long, complicated, and costly process that begins when patients receive care and ends when providers ultimately receive payment. The multiple steps in between involve coding compliance, claims review, and sometimes collections — all processes that increase costs for providers and involve lots of paperwork. InstaMed works with leading healthcare organizations across the country to eliminate paper and deliver better healthcare payments experiences by automating medical billing through electronic systems.
The company’s patented, private, cloud-based technology securely transmits healthcare payments and electronic transactions, moving money and healthcare data seamlessly and improving consumer satisfaction. InstaMed’s technology can be integrated into any healthcare IT system. The company also offers mobile support, making it even easier for patients to make payments to multiple providers in one place via the InstaMed Go and InstaMed Wallet apps, and ultimately, reducing the costs of collecting payments. In 2018, InstaMed processed more than $94 billion in transactions.
When: In July, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. acquired InstaMed for more than $500 million. The deal is, purportedly, the largest acquisition JPMorgan Chase has made in nearly a decade. InstaMed now operates as a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.
In 2018, InstaMed expanded its Philadelphia headquarters, adding a third floor at 18th and JFK Boulevard and launched the InstaMed Collaboration Center. The space is designed to foster collaboration between creators and innovators in the Philadelphia business community.
Why: A recent survey of the state of healthcare payments in America found providers are struggling to collect payments due to a lack of payment channels and are increasingly looking to adopt new payment technologies. More than 60 percent of the healthcare companies surveyed said they planned to add web payment options within a year of taking the survey.
What It Means: As healthcare systems aim to transform from archaic payment processes to more modern approaches, InstaMed’s technology could serve as the model for patients and providers to view all relevant billing data in one place, saving everyone time and money across a continuum of care.
