Equifax Expands Healthcare Offerings; Forms Relationship with Medlytix
ATLANTA, Dec. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Expanding its focus on healthcare, Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX) announced today an agreement with Medlytix, a leading healthcare consulting and technology company, to help hospitals and other healthcare providers strengthen their revenues through predictive analytics and custom-designed strategies.
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The new Equifax-Medlytix relationship will further enable healthcare providers to improve their patient financial interactions during every phase of the healthcare revenue cycle.
In addition, for tax-exempt hospitals, the Equifax/Medlytix product will help them identify and report charity care more accurately under new IRS requirements. Beginning with tax year 2009, tax exempt hospitals must distinguish bad debt from charity care in detailed community-benefit reports.
"Faced with rising costs, hospitals must continue to become more efficient and manage even more closely all of their financial interactions, including those with their patients. Our scoring and analytic solutions can help healthcare providers do just that," said Dann Adams, president, US Consumer Information Solutions, Equifax. "Through our relationship with Medlytix, as well as our other healthcare-specific solutions, Equifax is providing hospitals and other healthcare providers with valuable technologies to help them more effectively address and manage their finances."
Recognizing the unique data and financial needs of the healthcare industry, Equifax has brought together expertise and resources from across its businesses and packaged them into products to help healthcare providers address their specific industry challenges.
"The payment behavior patterns within the healthcare industry are unique and far more unpredictable than most industries," said Arvind Krishnaswami, CEO of Atlanta-based Medlytix. "Working with Equifax, we can help healthcare providers eliminate the guesswork with custom-designed solutions that combine industry trends and highly predictive scoring technologies. For tax-exempt hospitals, our solutions and combined expertise also provide a key advantage in helping them address charity-care reporting under new IRS requirements."
"Historically, most tax-exempt hospitals have been under-reporting their charity care," Krishnaswami said. "But working individually with each hospital, we have seen their charity care numbers increase by more than 20 percent in most cases - which is very important to note in an environment where public hospitals are under much more scrutiny to demonstrate community benefit."
In addition to the joint product offering with Medlytix, Equifax also offers Payment Predictor for Healthcare, a highly predictive credit modeling tool that assists healthcare providers in managing and determining the most effective way for a patient to pay for healthcare services.
Equifax healthcare solutions help hundreds of hospitals and healthcare providers optimize their financial performance. These solutions leverage the Equifax consumer credit reporting database, the industry's most comprehensive, along with the company's unique analytical and statistical tools. For more information on Equifax healthcare solutions, visit http://www.equifax.com/consumer/industry-specific/healthcare
About Equifax (www.equifax.com)
Equifax empowers businesses and consumers with information they can trust. A global leader in information solutions, we leverage one of the largest sources of consumer and commercial data, along with advanced analytics and proprietary technology, to create customized insights that enrich both the performance of businesses and the lives of consumers.
Customers have trusted Equifax for over 100 years to deliver innovative solutions with the highest integrity and reliability. Businesses - large and small - rely on us for consumer and business credit intelligence, portfolio management, fraud detection, decisioning technology, marketing tools, and much more. We empower individual consumers to manage their personal credit information, protect their identity, and maximize their financial well-being.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Equifax Inc. employs approximately 7,000 people in 15 countries through North America, Latin America and Europe. Equifax is a member of Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500(R) Index. Our common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EFX.
About Medlytix (www.Medlytix.com)
Medlytix, an Atlanta-based healthcare consulting and technology company, utilizes predictive sciences, technology and business expertise to arm hospitals and other healthcare providers with a powerful yet cost-effective revenue cycle system. Medlytix is the only company in the country that specifically designs, develops and implements scientific-based analytical solutions for each individual healthcare organization.
The Medlytix executive team initially built its national reputation for the design and implementation of predictive modeling and scoring solutions in the credit bureau industry as well as with major financial, auto, insurance and mortgage lenders. Following its widely recognized success, the company entered the healthcare field to extend the same high level of expertise to not-for-profit hospitals.
SOURCE Equifax Inc.
Released December 18, 2008