3 Ways Wealth Management and Accounting Firms Can Differentiate and Innovate Now

The clients of your wealth management or accounting firm will look elsewhere if you can’t differentiate yourself from the competition. Managing their medical bills and protecting their sensitive medical data is a natural way to strengthen your offerings while offering a new and valuable service. Here’s how to do it without hiring or retraining a large amount of your staff.

If you’re operating a wealth management or accounting firm, you know that your clients have options. You also know that you need to provide more than financial advice if you want to keep your competitive edge. If you aren’t continuously innovating and finding new ways to bring value to their lives, they will take their business elsewhere. 

We’ve identified three key areas where wealth management and accounting firms can add scalable services to the excellent work they already provide: managing medical bills, protecting medical privacy, and auditing their bills for overbilling and fraud. By establishing yourself in these areas, you’re not only staying ahead of your competition; you’re also taking an active interest in your clients’ overall financial well-being. 

By partnering with experts—rather than going on a long and expensive hunt for the right employees—wealth management and accounting firms can provide precisely the type of white-glove concierge service that their clients expect.

Partner with a Specialist to Expand Your Services & Retain Clients

Individuals and families with high net worth need medical attention like anyone else. It is their access to excellent healthcare that often makes them a target. They often carry exceptional insurance plans that unscrupulous individuals are willing to go to great lengths to gain access to. 

Working with an expert in a particular field gives you and your clients access to a wealth of knowledge without requiring you to bring that person into the fold full-time. You are free to contact them for assistance in their specialization whenever necessary. 

The benefits of partnering with a specialist include:

• Practical knowledge. This individual is out in their field every day, and likely experiences more new regulations, tools, and situations than their counterparts in the family office or business management firm full-time.
• Manageable expenses. If you were to bring on staff every single specialist you needed to streamline life for your clients, you would be facing millions of dollars in additional expenses. 
• Broaden your services. Contracting with outside partners considerably expands the services you can offer to your clients. 
• Extend your excellent client service. The right partner acts as an extension of your family office, providing the same personalized care and white-glove service as your staff.

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1: Medical Fraud and Insurance Overbilling Protection

To Protect Your Clients, You Need to Protect Their Medical Privacy

High-value clients don’t always realize how vulnerable their medical data is. Nearly all the files and information associated with their healthcare are digital. And medical overbilling runs rampant.

Medical privacy breaches in excess of $40 million disproportionately affected wealthy households.

It is critical for you and your clients to understand the ways in which their medical information is vulnerable. We’ve broken it down into three areas: 

• Medical identity theft. Thieves can use the personal information obtained in a breach (such as health insurance account number, Social Security number, and other sensitive data) to obtain healthcare for themselves and others. They can see a doctor, get procedures, and obtain prescribed medications or devices.
• Healthcare fraud. Broadly speaking, healthcare fraud involves filing incorrect or exaggerated claims on behalf of a patient to turn a profit. 
• Insurance overbilling. This occurs when a healthcare provider purposefully or mistakenly overcharges an insurance company for the services they provide. Often, the patient (your client) may be served with the bill.

Protecting this data, along with the reputation and well-being of their at-risk clients, should be top of mind for any wealth management or accounting firm.

To combat fraud, the FBI recommends close monitoring of health insurance and benefits, making sure services, dates, and practitioners match what is received in benefits explanations. Your clients, simply put, do not have the time to go digging through their calendars and receipts to make sure information matches.

This is ideally where your family office or business management firm steps in, but the healthcare world speaks its own language and often requires specialized training. To remain competitive, your practice needs to access and function in that world right away.

Partnering with a company that specializes in medical data protection and insurance bill auditing offers extraordinary benefits. You’ll free up your account managers to handle their important work, and your clients obtain industry-leading protection against medical identity theft and medical fraud from experts at the top of their field.

Scott Speranza, CEO of health management services company InAssist, is a proponent of this solution for the high net worth clients of family offices and business management firms. “If you wanted to offer this service in-house, your staff would need to undergo lengthy and expensive training. Your existing employees would also see their time split between their regular duties and the time-consuming work that goes into medical data protection,” he says. “By allowing the experts to take up this burden, you’re freeing your staff to focus solely on your clients.”

Scott Speranza, CEO HealthLock

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2: Manage Their Medical Bill Payments

Medical records are worth over 10 times more than financial records. There are several reasons for this, but among the most troubling are the following:

• It’s difficult to detect fraud—thus a thief can use someone’s medical record for their own gain for longer.
• Medical identities can be used to obtain healthcare—which is increasingly more expensive and difficult to access for large swaths of the population.
• Due to weaknesses in healthcare infrastructure and the lack of policing around the industry, it’s alarmingly easy to obtain someone’s medical data.

In short, your clients need someone to keep an eye on their medical data. There’s no better way to do that than through managing their bill payments; each bill and Explanation of Benefits that arrives is another opportunity to make sure your clients are not victims of fraud or medical identity theft.

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3: Audit Their Medical Bills

The most reliable way to detect any kind of fraud or medical identity theft is to carefully monitor all medical bills and Explanations of Benefits. The trained eye can see potential discrepancies; once spotted, it’s critical to follow up with doctors’ offices and insurance companies to get the whole story.

This is a step that your customers would otherwise have to take themselves. But they are busy people—and providing this service spares them hours of time and frustration. That alone makes your wealth management or accounting firm all the more appealing.

Your Customers Have Options—But So Does Your Firm

What’s holding you back from offering these services already?

Likely the fact that the healthcare world speaks its own language and often requires specialized training. To remain competitive, you need to access and function in that world right away. 

Partnering with a company that specializes in medical data protection and insurance bill auditing offers extraordinary benefits. Your staff can focus on their regular jobs, while your clients obtain industry-leading protection against medical identity theft and medical fraud from experts at the top of their field. 

Scott Speranza, CEO of health management services company InAssist, is a proponent of this solution for the high net worth clients of wealth management and accounting firms.

“If you wanted to offer this service in-house, your staff would need to undergo lengthy and expensive training. Your existing employees would also see their time split between their regular duties and the time-consuming work that goes into medical data protection,” he says. “By allowing the experts to take up this burden, you’re freeing your staff to focus solely on your clients.”

Partner With A Specialist To Expand Your Services & Retain Clients

Working with an expert in a particular field gives you and your clients access to a wealth of knowledge without requiring you to bring that person into the fold full-time. You are free to contact them for assistance in their specialization whenever necessary. 

The benefits of partnering with a specialist include:

• Practical knowledge. This individual is out in their field every day, and likely experiences more new regulations, tools, and situations than their counterparts in the wealth management or accounting firm full-time.
• Manageable expenses. If you were to bring on staff every single specialist you needed to streamline life for your clients, you would be facing millions of dollars in additional expenses. 
• Broaden your services. Contracting with outside partners considerably expands the services you can offer to your clients, adding value to your firm.

Extend your excellent client service. The right partner acts as an extension of your wealth management or accounting firm, providing the same personalized care and white-glove service as your staff.

Broaden Your Services To Stand Out From The Pack

No matter what field you operate in, a business that fails to innovate will fall behind its competitors. Wealth management and accounting firms are particularly vulnerable to this misstep, as their clientele already expect a certain level of service—one that will scale over time. 

Partnering with specialists allows you to look after more than just the financial health of your clients. You’re also, in more ways than one, guarding their mental and emotional well-being. The peace of mind that comes with knowing their personal medical data and other sensitive information is secure is priceless, as is the knowledge that your particular firm is willing to continue expanding your services. 

Continued innovation benefits your company and your clients and will appeal to new clients searching for guidance. By continuing to ask, “What else can I provide?” you’re effectively moving your firm to the head of the pack—and securing your own future.