North has solutions for healthcare, dental, telehealth, and online pharmacies.
Healthcare exists to help people feel better. Yet health, dental, telehealth, and pharmacy businesses can face a myriad of bad-feeling payment struggles. Their collective status as “specialty businesses” means increased security risks on top of insurance intricacies and financial-management challenges.
The result is often operational inefficiency that leads to less profits and unpredictable cash flows — as well as difficulty finding the right payment partner.
If you’re running a healthcare, dental, telehealth, or online pharmacy business, you may already know the challenge of finding payment processing that fits your needs.
In this article, we’ll cover the hurdles you face — as well as the ways to clear them.
Common challenges with healthcare payment processing.
Understanding the challenges healthcare businesses face is essential to solving them. Here are issues that regularly arise, as well as ways to address them.
Delayed payments.
Due to the nature of health insurance, many businesses are at the mercy of reimbursements. They must navigate complex claim corridors that often lead to financial strain. Collecting copays can also be a problem due to incorrect information causing a delay in payment.
Businesses can relieve this financial stress by implementing upfront payments for all copays and fees. This is especially effective for expensive treatments.
Human error.
Incorrect information in insurance claims can lead to denial of payment. Duplication of bills or additional bills as a result of filing errors can cause confusion for patients and chaos for the payment process.
Automating the payment process reduces the errors healthcare businesses often face — simultaneously improving the patient experience.
Reducing the burden of human effort also frees up staff to focus on other business efficiencies — again, creating better patient experiences.
Risk of fraud and security breaches.
Patients trust healthcare providers with highly sensitive personal and payment information. Health status, medical conditions, personal information, card/account numbers, and more.
With all that valuable information on hand, healthcare businesses become a prime target for hacking and fraud.
Finding an experienced payment processor who understands the sophisticated nature of security — and the equally sophisticated tactics of fraudsters — is essential in building a comprehensive, safe healthcare payment system.
Collecting payments.
Tracking patients, sending invoices, then follow-ups — all time-consuming tasks that can vex staff and divert attention from activity that can enhance and grow the business.
A strong monitoring and control strategy can prevent delays and help businesses create more efficient follow-up strategies. Automated alerts that send reminders for owed amounts can reduce the human burden — and often speed up the entire collection process.
Staying on top of insurance guidelines.
The legal aspect of healthcare payments, billing codes, updates, and guidelines — more complexity to navigate. Healthcare businesses have an obligation to adhere to these payment policies.
It can be time-consuming and resource-draining.
Investing in automation and advanced technology can relieve much of this stress and keep businesses in tune with up-to-date information.
Payment processing tools that work hard for healthcare.
The aforementioned challenges may seem numerous and daunting, but there are just as many solutions to address them. We’ll delve into the details that can build a robust payment system for healthcare, dental, telehealth, and online pharmacy businesses.
These are essential resources to consider. They’ll bring your enterprise tools to reduce confusion and human error — and vastly improve the ways you get paid.
In-office terminals.
It may sound like the most basic and obvious tool, but in-office smart terminals are the backbone of a vast number of healthcare businesses. And they do far more than accept payments on the day of a patient’s visit.
In addition to processing secure payments, these all-in-one systems give you the power to manage inventory and synchronize customer details and data. They give you the agility to accept a wide range of payment options, including EMV cards, contactless methods, and digital wallets — as well as the enduring staples: Credit and debit cards.
A smart terminal can also handle the intricacies of recurring billing, including automating invoicing and payment confirmation emails thanks to their integrated database functions (we’ll cover invoicing in more depth below).
These all-in-one wonders can even include a receipt printer peripheral for those who want a hard copy record of their payment — and they can also send a digital version by email.
Invoicing tools.
Medical billing software automates many healthcare business tasks, including managing patient and insurance information, submitting insurance claims, tracking payments and claims, handling appeals and denials, and generating financial reports.
It also offers patients self-service portal capabilities that include integrated payment functions — improving the speed and efficiency of payments. Those with internet access can pay their bill online. Your business would send them an invoice via an email or text message that contains a link to your secure payment portal.
These tools give patients the freedom to pay their invoices in convenient ways. In addition to online payments, they can pay in-person — with a credit card, debit card, or digital wallet — using a smart terminal like we discussed earlier.
Patients can also call in payment information. Office staff input this information into the payment system’s virtual terminal.
Recurring billing.
Much of healthcare is repeat, ongoing business. Regular check-ups and appointments, maintenance prescriptions, routine teeth cleaning. Modern billing technology is right there to maximize the business potential. Billing software can be configured by healthcare businesses to accept recurring payments.
Patients agree to provide account or card information. Withdrawals are scheduled for regular intervals (usually once per month). Healthcare businesses provide the patient with the details of the agreement, including how to make changes and update account information as needed.
With recurring billing, both parties know how much money they will be sending or receiving and when this will occur. As a result, budgeting and planning become routine — even easy.
Patients stop worrying about forgetting a payment. And such a system greatly reduces the need to chase down delinquent payments.
HIPAA-compliant merchant accounts.
The right to privacy in healthcare is enormous and ever-present. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that any payment processing system used by medical providers protect patient information and payment details.
HIPAA-compliant payment processing for healthcare providers ensures that protected information remains secure while simultaneously facilitating swift and accurate transactions that speed up the payment cycle, inspire higher rates of patient satisfaction, and furnish business owners with additional capital to meet other needs and expenses.
In order for your system to process credit cards in a HIPAA-compliant way, you should put several strategies into practice. Your payment processor must agree to sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) to ensure they are legally bound under HIPAA to protect patient information.
Just as important, patient health information (PHI) must always be kept separate from payment data. Therefore, your HIPAA-compliant system should not require the storage of PHI or, if doing so is unavoidable, must ensure that access is controlled and the data is encrypted.
Additionally, encrypting all data, both at rest and in transit, makes for a much more secure environment that reduces the chances of data breach and unauthorized access.
Finally, the system has tools that enable you to give access permissions only to those who need to come in contact with patient information. Following these best practices enables you to safeguard your records and patients against HIPAA violations and provide an efficient and trustworthy payments ecosystem, whether the care is in-person or online.
North and Rectangle Health keep your healthcare business healthy.
We have partnered with industry leader Rectangle Health to create a comprehensive payment system for healthcare, dental, telehealth, and online pharmacy businesses. Their payments solution within Practice Management Bridge® - Bridge™ Payments, not only meets the unique challenges facing healthcare businesses, it provides you, the business owner, with the amenities and conveniences that merchants in other industries expect from their payment processing.
We bring you healthcare payments that are simple, safe, and secure — while offering the value-added enhancements and integrations that make modern payment processing so powerful, easy, and effective.
We employ an easy-to-use solution to automate and optimize payment capture. The benefits are numerous.
- Automatic payment posting.
- Seamless technology integrations.
- Reduced staff burdens.
- Cutting costs associated with paper payments.
- Enhancing the patient experience.
- Improving cash flow.
- Address your patients’ financial needs.
- Convenient online 24/7 bill pay.
Ready to take your healthcare payments to the next level? North and Practice Management Bridge® are here to help.
Go North for all your healthcare payment needs.
