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Learn from FSA debit card technology

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Do you agree with Scott Withrow that healthcare IT shops can learn best practices from the adoption of the flexible spending account (FSA) debit card? Share your comments about FSA debit card technology, as discussed in the Feb. 17 Healthcare IT e-newsletter.

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by carol

Even though the debit card is a great advantage for employees and FSA. However Walmart has made it difficult (impossible) to use the technology. Walmart stated that they will no long allow for the ADP Debit Cards to be used in their stores. The question become who else will join Walmart. Is this a change of heart for this technology or a political statement??

by pposton

How will the medical insurance companies connect to the credit card networks to pick up those transactions? Most of the medical insurance companies do not have that type of experience for that type of activity and may not want to pay to connect to those networks that only a minority of the people use. If medical insurance companies outsource that function, how can the medical insurance companies manage and properly report all of the HIPAA mandated rules.

The concept is nice, but implementing something like that would have to be done by the larger medical insurance companies to bring down all of the costs, answer all the questions, and resolve all of the issues before any medium to small medical insurance companies would even think about it.

Then after you get all of these things accomplished, who says that the pharmacist or doctor down the road will subscribe to that service?

The concept is good, but the reality is that most medical insurance companies are very reserved and slow to change due to HIPAA security and the fear that something bad may happen and that is what people remember about their company.

by prefbid ii

We already have a nightmare of dozens of payment options to keep track of. The last thing I would want to do is try to build another infrastructure to deal with a debit card that can only be used for certain types of services and merchandise.

However, if one of the major card companies wanted to front the verification and validation tasks and came up with a clean way to insure that payments are authorized, I'd be willing to follow. But lead in this? No way.

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