Fintech in Healthcare: Software Innovations for HealthTech

Hey there!

Fintech in healthcare is a booming industry. 

HealthTech= Fintech + Healthcare

Yes, you heard that right!

Although financial technology in healthcare is in its early stages.

But, thanks to Fintech’s digital nature, millions of people living in rural areas have access to affordable, readily available, and diverse financial services.

Health services financing can undergo a radical shift if the healthcare industry takes advantage of the same possibilities for increased connectivity, better operations, and innovative problem-solving.

There are repercussions for economic development and individual well-being in the multifaceted and ever-changing sphere of healthcare funding. Many countries have made significant progress toward the transformative goal of changing their health funding systems to achieve long-term strategic goals like Universal Health Care. However, these initiatives have not yet yielded the anticipated overall benefits.

Let’s examine how financial technology is changing healthcare in the years leading up to 2025 and beyond.

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What is Fintech For Health?

Fintech, like healthcare tech, is an umbrella term that includes any technology created, employed, or upgraded for the finance and accounting functions. Startups and enterprise companies build their fintech stacks to automate repetitive tasks and generate insights-based results.

Financial technology covers embedded finance technologies, including digital identification, mobile money, AI, robotics, and blockchain. Through digital financial services such as savings, loans, insurance, consulting, and payments, these technologies are utilized in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) models.

Achieving one’s desired health outcome through the timely application of personal health services is what we mean when we talk about access to healthcare. One critical component in reaching this objective is the ability to pay for healthcare quickly, and FinTech has been at the forefront of this movement with significant advances.

Nevertheless, not every model or tool is instantly useful for solving health financial problems, despite the anticipation. Digital financial solutions, critical digital enablers, and the channel to healthcare services were the three main components of fintech solutions that we found valuable in defining a framework for fintech for health. 

Use Cases

Use Case 1: Health Lending: Getting financial resources for medical services.

Use Case 2: Health Wallets: Help provide funds for savings for different types of medicine.

Use Case 3: Improving Healthcare Access: Providing quick payment for personalized healthcare services.

Innovative Healthcare FinTech Startups

• Greenphire: Research experts’ workflows will be transformed by Greenphire’s clinical payment technology. Patients can pay with greater convenience with its product, ClinCard. Patients can swiftly take care of financial transactions and focus on key functions thanks to the card’s compatibility with numerous currencies. The eClinicalGPS accelerates the approval process, automates the implementation of payments in local currencies, and ensures proper payment calculation.
• Lively: A health savings account for future medical costs. There is no minimum balance requirement, and customers can start investing immediately; furthermore, the investments are not subject to taxes. Any security offered on the TD Ameritrade platform, including exchange-traded funds (ETFs), stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, can be invested using HSA money.
• AccessOne: Patient financing alternatives are offered by AccessOne. Clients’ satisfaction as patients is boosted by the company’s customer-centric approach. Funding approaches that benefit providers and patient-facing programs are part of their comprehensive platform.
• Cedar: Cedar offers healthcare organizations payment solutions that are hosted in the cloud. It enables medical facilities and practices to begin electronic payment processing and patient invoicing using patient-centric billing systems. In addition, it provides analytics tools that help healthcare providers optimize their revenue cycle processes by providing insights. It makes use of a cloud-based billing technology that simplifies the resolution of typical billing concerns for patients.
• Paytient: It allows businesses to provide their workers with prepaid cards that they can use to pay for a variety of healthcare-related items, including prescription drugs, medical insurance, and bills. It provides a dashboard for managing payments and creating personalized payment plans. For users using Android smartphones, it offers an app-based platform.
• InstaMed: InstaMed is a service that helps people pay their medical bills. It allows doctors to get payment from their patients. It works with the one that’s already in place. Any device—phones, tablets, desktop computers, etc.—can access it.
• CrediHealth: The CrediHealth platform is an online hub for medical treatment. Medical facilities, physicians, diagnostic centers, and drugstores can all be located using this service. Consultations, second opinions, and surgical procedures can all be scheduled through this portal. In addition to that, it offers loans, medical exams, medication delivery, and more.

HealthTech and Fintech: How is the Duo Working?

With market capitalization over $10 billion, Marqeta, Affirm, Coinbase, Adyen, Bill.com, and Upstart have all traded since their initial public offerings (IPOs) in recent years. This, together with Stripe’s private market success and Square’s huge public market valuation, highlights the category’s allure. As a result, prominent fintechs with analogous business models, such as Bitso, Checkout.com, Coinswitch Kuber, and Rapyd, have attracted substantial later-stage financing. As of now, the health tech industry lacks a long tail with notable results; the single health tech company, Veeva, is trading at approximately $25 billion, which is above $15 billion.

It is unclear where the most significant results can be generated with the limited number of publicly traded corporations. To be included in the list of the most successful outcomes, Veeva is competing with several other health tech fields that receive substantial funding. A similar pattern is emerging in the health technology sector, where an increasing number of firms are focusing on particular diseases, demographics, and regions. These businesses will likely merge or acquire one another in the next few years, allowing them to provide a more comprehensive suite of services. With so many big health systems and payers experiencing vendor fatigue and so many patients dealing with multiple long-term illnesses, this makes perfect sense.

Where is Fintech for Health Already in Use?

Startups abound in the Fintech for Health sector. In Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania, digital financial service models have been developed for the healthcare business, though to a lesser degree. These models, which were developed on top of preexisting digital wallets like M-TIBA (PharmAccess) and M-pesa, have received substantial funding from donors. Asian development organizations, healthcare providers, and digital health businesses with a focus on low- and moderate-income communities are beginning to take notice of fintech for health.

Startups in the growth stage of the financial technology industry are quickly expanding into new markets, such as healthcare, thanks to their substantial funding, established track record, and lack of constraints imposed by the requirement to generate shareholder revenue. For those who may still have trouble getting private health insurance, (unproven) mutual aid models like Shuidi and Kitabisa are offering financial security in Indonesia and China.

In Bangladesh, two prominent firms have recently expanded their services: Pathao, a ride-hailing platform supported by GoJek, and bKash, a digital healthcare solutions partner, are working together to integrate microinsurance and teleconsultations. Pathao also offers pharmaceutical delivery. 

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Trends and Statistics

According to the World Health Organization:

• Over 100 million people are currently in poverty as a consequence of healthcare costs.
• Healthcare expenses eat up 10% or more of household budgets for approximately 1 billion people globally, putting them at risk of poverty.
• 60 million lives might be avoided and average life expectancy could rise by three and a half years by 2030 if primary health care (PHC) initiatives were to be scaled up across poor and middle-income nations.
• The last decade has seen a rise in endorsements for free health care (FHC) policies, particularly in West Africa.
• There will be no substantial improvement in the world’s ability to provide health coverage to all by 2030.
• 2 billion people are struggling financially, with 344 million plunging even farther into extreme poverty as a result of health expenses, and 1 billion dealing with catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending.
• During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, critical services were further interrupted in 92% of countries. Even in the year 2022, 84% of nations reported interruptions.

Benefits of Fintech in Healthcare

1. Easier Payment Options: With the help of fintech, digital wallets, online payments, and automated billing have become the norm for paying for healthcare services.
2. Lower Costs: FinTech helps keep healthcare administrative expenses down by automating processes like billing and claims.
3. Access to Telemedicine: Fintech facilitates virtual consultations, which increase access to healthcare, particularly in underserved areas. This brings us to our third point: telemedicine.
4. Flexible Payments: Fintech makes it easy to pay for healthcare by providing options like medical credit cards and payment plans.
5. Monitor Spending: Healthcare spending can be better managed with the help of fintech solutions that allow you to monitor and budget for these costs.
6. Secure Transactions: You can rest assured that your financial transactions and personal data are protected from fraud thanks to the advanced security features in FinTech.
7. Insurance Assistance: Fintech streamlines the claims process and maximizes coverage.
8. You Know Exactly What You’re Paying For: Fintech makes medical service prices crystal clear.
9. Real-Time Info: With FinTech, you can receive updates on claims, payments, and account balances in real-time.
10. Enhanced User Experience: With fintech apps, managing your healthcare funds from the comfort of your own home is a breeze, thanks to their intuitive designs.

Challenges of Fintech in Healthcare

1. Ensuring Data Security: Protecting patient information from hackers is no easy feat.
2. Privacy Concerns: Assuring the confidentiality of individual health records is no easy feat.
3. Regulatory Hurdles: It is difficult for fintech companies to comply with the myriad of healthcare rules and regulations.
4. Integration Issues: Problems with Integration: It is not uncommon for new fintech systems to have trouble integrating with older healthcare systems.
5. User Trust: Developing confidence in new financial tools among healthcare practitioners and patients is a slow process.

Conclusion

Finally, fintech is bringing about a sea change in healthcare by improving the accessibility, efficiency, and inclusiveness of financial services. It improves healthcare access for people by offering easy payments, cutting expenses, and providing flexible options. Data security, privacy, regulatory, integration, and trust-building issues are only a few of the obstacles that must be overcome. The potential for fintech to revolt healthcare financing and delivery is enormous as it develops further.

If FinTech can find remedies to these problems, it will be a game-changer in the fight for healthcare equality and better health outcomes around the world. There is still a long way to go, but fintech is having a tremendous and encouraging effect on healthcare.

The next three to five years should be filled with excitement if the history of fintech is any indication of what health tech has in store!

Thanks for reading!

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