RIP Medical Debt and TransUnion Healthcare Surpass $5 Billion of Medical Debt Relieved and Expand Partnership

CHICAGO, Sept. 16, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- National nonprofit RIP Medical Debt, with the support of data and insights from longtime partner TransUnion Healthcare, reached a new milestone, helping to relieve more than $5 billion in medical debt for patients experiencing financial hardship. Medical debts continue to be a nationwide problem. The U.S. Census Bureau indicates that nearly one in five families carry such obligations with a median balance of $2,000.

To better support hospitals, health systems, and physician groups in helping patients resolve these debts, TransUnion Healthcare (NYSE: TRU) and RIP Medical Debt announced today the strengthening of their partnership. The enhanced partnership will allow healthcare providers to more easily implement RIP Medical Debt’s model as part of their revenue cycle process.

RIP Medical Debt has a highly leveraged debt abolishment model that combines the generosity of donors with debt industry expertise to produce a high volume of debt relief return, mitigating significant financial and mental distress for nearly 3 million people to date. Health systems can strengthen individuals and communities by relieving dormant, uncollectible, and damaging bad debt and can identify opportunities to refine their financial assistance programs to better serve their communities. 

“We are proud to have strengthened our partnership with RIP Medical Debt to make our offerings easier to implement for healthcare providers as many patients simply cannot afford their needed healthcare,” said Dave Wojczynski, president of TransUnion Healthcare. “Through TransUnion Healthcare’s partnership with RIP Medical Debt, we provide insights that can help remove the burden of unavoidable medical debt for individuals and families across the country.”

TransUnion’s financial clearance solutions deliver a customizable methodology and process for collecting on self-pay and balance-after-insurance accounts. The solutions leverage TransUnion’s holistic, data-driven Insurance Discovery and Patient Financial Clearance offerings to maximize revenue for a hospital by identifying missed insurance coverage and segmenting the remaining patient payment balances based on financial assistance eligibility and likelihood of payment.

“Data and insights provided by TransUnion Healthcare have been integral to the success of RIP Medical Debt,” said Allison Sesso, RIP Medical Debt’s executive director. “We have jointly helped relieve $5 billion in medical debt and the expansion of our partnership will lead to even more support for those patients in financial need.”

Four Easy Steps to Helping Healthcare Providers and their Communities

Healthcare providers can remove financial burden for patients facing financial hardship and enhance their self-pay collections process in four steps.

1. After exhausting their Insurance Discovery search, providers with permissible purpose can assess their patients’ ability to pay and presumptively qualify them for charity care while segmenting those accounts for follow-up.
   
   
2. After collections efforts have ended, providers can send their dormant self-pay accounts to RIP Medical Debt.
   
   
3. RIP Medical Debt will then use TransUnion Healthcare’s powerful financial assistance analytics to identify accounts for people in financial hardship and buy the accounts at fair market value with donor funds or receive them via donation.
   
   
4. After abolishing the debt, RIP Medical Debt sends debt relief notices to the provider’s patients to help them repair their credit reports, renew access to resources they can use to rebuild and recover, and remove barriers to seeking healthcare.

“By removing this burden of old debt, we hope to better engage with our patients, so they access care and other services when they need them without the fear of unmanageable expenses,” shared Anthony Keck, Ballad Health's Chief Population Health Officer. 

About TransUnion (NYSE: TRU)
TransUnion is a global information and insights company that makes trust possible in the modern economy. We do this by providing a comprehensive picture of each person so they can be reliably and safely represented in the marketplace. As a result, businesses and consumers can transact with confidence and achieve great things. We call this Information for Good.®

TransUnion Healthcare, a wholly owned subsidiary of TransUnion, makes mutual trust possible between patients, providers, and payers by helping them navigate payment uncertainty. Our Revenue Protection^® solutions leverage comprehensive data, accurate insights and industry expertise to engage patients early, ensure earned revenue gets paid and optimize payment strategies. TransUnion Healthcare helps over 1,850 hospitals and 550,000 physicians collectively recover more than $1.2 billion annually in revenue.

A leading presence in more than 30 countries across five continents, TransUnion provides solutions that help create economic opportunity, great experiences and personal empowerment for hundreds of millions of people.

https://www.transunionhealthcare.com

About RIP Medical Debt
Since being founded in 2014 by two former debt collectors, RIP Medical Debt has acquired — and abolished — more than $5 billion of burdensome medical debt, helping over 2.8 million families and addressing a major social determinant of health. RIP partners with individuals, faith-based organizations, foundations, and corporations and empowers donors by converting every dollar contributed into $100 of medical debt relief. RIP partners with hospitals and health systems and physician groups to acquire medical debt for abolishment. RIP rose to national prominence on an episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver in which RIP facilitated the abolishment of $15M in medical debt. In December of 2020, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $50 million to RIP to help uplift struggling communities. To learn more, visit www.ripmedicaldebt.org/hospitals/