A new way of looking at health spending accounts

It’s an innovative approach to processing HSA and WSA claims

A new way of looking at health spending accounts

Life & Health

By Mitchell Scrimgeour-Brown

The insurance industry is all about numbers, so here’s another one: 28.

That’s the percentage of Canadian employees with health spending accounts who don’t use them because they have to pay out of pocket up front.

“So these companies are spending all this money on their benefits,” said Chanddeep Maddan, co-founder of CEO of Aya Payments Inc.  “But the employees aren’t seeing the value because they’re saying, ‘Well, I’m going to have to spend money out of pocket and then get reimbursed at a certain period of time afterwards.’ That is not the best user experience for the employee.”

That’s why Aya Payments introduced the Aya Prepaid Health and Wellness Mastercard as an innovative approach to HSAs and WSAs for claims. With Aya, plan members enjoy the convenience of paperless claims and can also purchase healthcare with the Aya Prepaid Mastercard instead of having to pay out of pocket and get reimbursed.

“If you look at some of the surveys done about benefit plans and employee satisfaction, you see that health spending accounts are the single biggest reason why employees stay with their employers,” Madaan said.

“With the Aya Prepaid Mastercard, all you need to do is go to a health or wellness merchant and use the card, and we will take out the balance from the appropriate spending account so that you don’t have to worry about paying out of pocket or any kind of reporting or adjudication. We’ve made that entire process seamless.”

But it’s not just employees that benefit from Aya’s innovation, Madaan said. Coming to the company from the payment processing industry, he knows very well how much the potential for fraud can cost employers.

“Other health spending providers traditionally review only about 5%-10% of claims that come in,” he explained.

“What Aya has done is we’ve built a full machine-learning adjudication system that reviews 100% of claims. We look at every single claim that comes in, and that trains our system to immediately recognize future claims that are similar. This way, we are able to catch fraud early on and prevent fraud.”

The third benefit of Aya’s approach is full reporting functionality in the back end, allowing companies the depth and breadth of data they need (while still respecting employee privacy) to empower those companies to make smart decisions.

“So it becomes more of a data-based offering,” Madaan said, “one where you’re giving employers exactly what their employees need versus selling companies a costly solution that ultimately their employees won’t be able to benefit from.”

Learn more about the hassle-free solution to accessing health spending account benefits here.    

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