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HICAPS Australia's leading ancillary health claims and payments service and a wholly-owned subsidiary of National Australia Bank, has launched a new service further streamlining e-claims for the ancillary health sector.
The new HICAPS service allows participating health funds and health service providers access to a secure internet site with a database of all transactions and also provides a means to consolidate the settlement of payments between the participating health funds and health service providers.
HICAPS Chief Executive Officer, Mr Greg Millane, said the numbers of consumers who wanted to process claims electronically had grown dramatically in the last six years and the new service was about further streamlining the backend to help the consumer behaviour shift.
"The numbers of transactions through HICAPS had grown enormously in the last six years, with more than 50 per cent of all ancillary health claims now processed electronically. We've certainly seen great adoption of electronic claims. For consumers it's now much easier to process their claims.
"On the other hand, feedback from health funds and health service providers showed that the paper trail of reconciling the numerous bank deposits from multiple health funds was extremely complex. This is all about helping to solve the payment and reconciliation puzzle.
"What we've created is a real time saving in reconciling the books and a valuable online database that health funds and providers can use to access their own records," Mr Millane said.
"For health service providers, many of whom are small businesses, the benefits are obvious. The HICAPS consolidated settlement and statement service makes the processing of payments much easier – a significant time saving. And they also can now access data in a much more useable format and use this to create valuable information for their business.
"HICAPS has already greatly reduced the cost to health funds of processing members' claims and now with the consolidated settlement service they can expect even greater savings. The participating health funds no longer need to distribute statements or make settlements with each health provider, they only need to make one daily settlement with HICAPS and we'll then make the payments to each provider across Australia," he said.
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About HICAPS
Formed in 1998 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of National Australia Bank, HICAPS (Health Industry Claims and Payments Service) is Australia's leading ancillary health claims and payments service with about 80 per cent share of the online ancillary health claims market in Australia. HICAPS provides payment and settlement facilities to 36 Australian health funds and more than 18,000 health service providers including dentists, podiatrists, physiotherapists, chiropractors, osteopaths and optometrists. Using an EFTPOS platform, customers with ancillary health insurance can swipe their membership card and payment is transferred from the health fund to the health service provider. Health fund members need then only pay any remaining balance.
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