Daytona Beach, Florida-based Halifax Health is working with Fort Mill, South Carolina-based AccessOne to give consumers more flexible ways to pay for their care.
Through the partnership, Halifax will be able to offer all its patients access to AccessOne’s financing programs. The company has a variety of payment plans to help patients fund their medical costs, including interest-free long-term plans and lower monthly payment options with a low interest rate.
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In a recent phone interview, AccessOne CEO Mark Spinner said his company and Halifax have been in exploratory conversations for about a year.
“Over the last several years, they’ve seen more and more patients coming through their doors that owe some balance,” he said. “It’s a great win for the Daytona Beach community because it means Halifax is … delivering solutions where there’s a patient need.”
The offering, which is cobranded with and sponsored by Halifax, should be available to patients soon, Spinner said. Once the program goes live, Halifax will put up information at its facilities to advertise it.
Patient participation is voluntary, but every consumer interested in the program at Halifax will be accepted.
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“For the past 90 years, we’ve offered our community award-winning clinical outcomes and innovation in technology, and we consider our partnership with AccessOne an extension of that excellence,” Arvin Lewis, Halifax’s senior vice president and chief revenue officer, said in a statement. “With AccessOne, Halifax Health will now be able to provide tailored, consumer-driven financing options to address our patients’ increasing financial burdens.”
Spinner said this partnership has wider implications on the healthcare industry. Halifax Health, a safety net hospital, isn’t the only organization whose patients are feeling the pains of medical costs.
“It’s something born out of what’s happening with the regulatory landscape and the dynamics around insurance coverage today,” he said. “This problem of affordability for consumers in terms of getting access and affording the care they need is a real issue.”
It’s such a dilemma that other organizations are also working on solving it.
Better, a startup in San Francisco, is looking at the topic of hefty medical costs through a different lens. Rachael Norman and John Stockdale cofounded the company in 2016 to make it easier for people to file out-of-network insurance claims.
Last year, Better teamed up with RIP Medical Debt, a New York City-based nonprofit, to forgive $16 million of medical debt. That’s more than the amount comedian John Oliver forgave in the summer of 2016: $14.9 million.
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