A story that has inflamed a lot of people tells of a new credit scoring system under development specifically to rate patients’ ability to pay their hospital bills. The name of the company developing the system is Healthcare Analytics, a Massachusetts start-up that refers to the system as a hospital risk assessment tool. Investors in the company include Fair Issac Corp., developer of that well known credit scoring system called FICO.

Some people are referring to this new system as MedFICO and are sounding the alarm that it will be used to deny medical treatment to people whom the system indicates might be unlikely to pay their medical bills. There are many issues being discussed, including the possibility of being denied treatment due to an error in the MedFICO record - errors in traditional credit reports are fairly common and they are troublesome and time consuming to have expunged. Read the full story here.

How is this related to medical tourism? Indirectly, in that it is yet another assault on U.S. patients, driving them harder to find medical care they can afford offshore.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Medical Tourism News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.