3 Ways Family Offices and Business Management Firms Can Differentiate and Innovate Now

The clients of your family office or business management firm will look elsewhere if you can’t differentiate yourself from the competition. 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 family office or business management firm, you know that your clients have options. Today’s high-value clients demand more than financial advice from their stewards. 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 family offices can add scalable services to the excellent work they already provide: medical billing protection, cybersecurity, and relationship management. By establishing yourself in these areas, you’re not only staying ahead of your competition; you’re also taking a more holistic approach to your clients’ overall financial and mental well-being. 

By partnering with experts—rather than going on a long and expensive hunt for the right employees—you can provide precisely the type of white-glove concierge service that your 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 family office or business management 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: Cybersecurity

Are Your Clients’ Devices Spying on Them? A Cybersecurity Expert Can Find Out

Virtually everything your clients do or own—from the aforementioned social media to home security systems and even video game systems or “smart” appliances—is connected to the internet in some way. These platforms and devices are useful, but they provide additional back doors for thieves to sneak in through. 

You don’t necessarily need your cybersecurity expert to have a full-time role in your family office or business management firm. They can act as periodic advisors after an initial consultation, where they can pinpoint exactly where a family’s digital weaknesses lie, and provide necessary guidance in sharing what to post, how much information to share, and even how to remove things like timestamps and GPS coordinates from photos.

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3: Relationship Management

Navigating Family Relationships Can be Challenging

Your clients face all the challenges of a regular family and then some: the same wealth that opens opportunities for them can create trouble within the family. Partnering with an expert in managing relationships can benefit clients undergoing particular changes. They may have backgrounds in psychology, and be adept at probing beneath surface-layer issues to find the real, often emotional problems that your high-value families may face. 

These individuals can smooth the transition of wealth and responsibilities from one generation to another. They can also assist parents who want to raise responsible, hard-working children who aren’t dependent on trust funds.

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. Family offices and business management 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 family office 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 office or firm to the head of the pack—and securing your own future.