Mastercard launches healthcare products aimed at cybersecurity, predictive analytics

Mastercard is expanding the reach of its financial expertise—particularly when it comes to cybersecurity—into the healthcare industry.

The financial services company best known for its credit cards is launching Mastercard Healthcare Solutions, a collection of software products aimed at tackling perennial pain points in the business of healthcare, officials announced at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas on Sunday. The new product suite—which will target both payers and providers, as well as technology platforms used by payers and providers—will include a host of data security offerings. This will include improved biometrics and behavioral analytics to protect health information against the ever-rising threat of data breaches.

Nearly 32 million patient records were breached in the first half of 2019, compared to 14.2 million patient records affected by breach incidents in the entire year of 2018, according to a breach report from Protenus and DataBreaches.net. This represents a fast-growing financial threat to healthcare organizations, Moody's Investors Services has said.

"It's a way to bring tried and true assets to the healthcare ecosystem," Marie Aloisi, senior vice president of commercial payments, B2B acceptance and healthcare at Mastercard, told FierceHealthcare. "There's a healthcare data breach every day. This is a serious problem."

They will also offer products aimed at using AI and machine learning to help payers curb fraud, waste and abuse, as well as predictive analytics to enable providers to use more effective billing strategies and improve their revenue cycle management. It's an extension of similar products already offered to other industries, including major fast-food chains and large financial institutions, Aloisi said.

She points to the typical experience at a doctor's office where patients are often handed a clipboard and asked to fill out multiple pieces of paper with secure information on it. That information is typed into a computer system by a human and the paper is thrown out. "Think about how archaic that is," Aloisi said. "They are 15 years behind every other industry."

Mastercard's products will accelerate healthcare organizations' migration to a fully digitized and authenticated environment, she said. The products will be aimed at complementing existing systems used in healthcare such as payment assurance, payment integrity and security systems rather than seeking to replace them, she said.