An initiative of the Medical Banking Project is aiming to develop a common medical banking platform in the next year to support a growing range of healthcare financial transactions.
The organization, as part of its COMBAT initiative, hopes to continue work on the platform this year to build transactional capabilities, said John Casillas, executive director of the project.
Casillas made the announcement during the fifth Medical Banking Institute, held this week in Marietta, Ga.
COMBAT, which stands for Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture and Technology, is hoping to follow an aggressive timeframe to enable the banking system to facilitate remittance advice communication in healthcare.
"We'll focus on medical banking transactions that we can commoditize rapidly," Casillas said.
He said the organization is setting up a steering committee to work on a roadmap for the platform. Once formed, the committee is expected to develop a formal document in about 45 days. "There's been a lot of spadework done on this already," Casillas said.
The organization estimates that banking participation in remittance management could save the healthcare industry as much as $35 billion.
Allowing time to have the project's members approve the platform and for development, Casillas said he hopes the first live transactions will go through the network by the end of the year.
The project is part of the Medical Banking Project two-year-old initiative to implement an open standards-based reference architecture linking open-source components that have been successfully tested and deployed in other industries.
The project is working with other standards organizations, such as Health Level Seven, and other organizations in the healthcare industry, such as the Medical Group Management Association and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
The organization reported making progress with its efforts to test an initiative it calls the HSA Accumulator, which is expected to help determine how much a patient owes when that patient is covered by a high-deductible health plan.
Progress was made on determining the technical requirements for the HSA Accumulator, and the organization hopes to develop necessary programming and test the concept in a pilot case within a couple months, Casillas said.