It is no secret that consumers continue to have grave concerns about the rising cost of healthcare. This is the case not only with hospital care, but also when it comes to the expenses incurred from visits to the patient’s medical provider business.
However, there are other payment trends that are equally important and worthy of your attention as a provider of health services. Understanding what they are can help you to move your telehealth company forward.
Increased use of alternative payment methods.
Payment types are expanding in all businesses, including healthcare. These include the acceptance of credit and debit cards, digital wallets, and direct ACH payments from customers’ bank accounts.
In 2025, patients will be even more likely to demand expanded ways to pay their bills. In addition to the standard cash and credit cards, healthcare providers will move toward offering other choices as well.
Most notably, digital wallets such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay will continue to gain prominence. As is the case with other service providers and sellers, consumers of medical care are increasingly leaving cash and physical cards behind in favor of the exclusive use of their smartphones as purchasing devices.
Digital wallets offer numerous benefits to their users, including convenience, ease, efficiency, and robust multi-level layers of security that minimize the chance of vulnerability to identity theft or data breaches.
The need to focus on managing cards-on-file.
The rising costs of healthcare have led to an upsurge in payment plans. As a consequence, providers must prioritize the management of cards-on-file.
Healthcare providers are working hard to furnish their cash-strapped patients with alternative payment solutions to offset the higher medical costs they are experiencing. As a result, offices like yours need to manage many more cards on file than was the case in the past.
Consequently, providers must find ways to identify and update existing data, deleting information that is no longer being used. Additionally, tokenization will continue to be the preferred way of securely storing patient data without the need to capture or transmit this sensitive information.
This protocol involves replacing patient payment details with a series of benign values that cannot be used by hackers.
To ensure that your systems are taking advantage of tokenization and other cutting-edge security protocols designed to safeguard patient data, your first step should be to talk with your healthcare merchant account provider.
They can work with you to install and implement these security measures.
Shift toward cloud-based payments infrastructure.
Because of its higher offsite security and enhanced compliance capabilities, the cloud has become the standard place for healthcare providers to store electronic health records. In 2025 and beyond, they will also move their payment infrastructures into this safer arena.
Once this step has been accomplished, healthcare providers will begin to realize the many advantages of cloud-based storage. These include increased efficiency and scalability.
Relying on this type of offsite storage also leads to greater ease in deployment and management as well as enhanced troubleshooting and support for all major payment types.
Making data security a priority.
In a changing security landscape, savvy healthcare providers are making data safety a priority. They are doing so by utilizing tokenization, data minimization, and cutting-edge technology.
In an age when bad actors are pulling out all the stops to exploit even the most subtle vulnerabilities to gain possession of patient data and payment details, medical practices need to react with equal comprehensiveness and intensity.
To that end, 2025 will see an even stronger emphasis on protecting data.
This multi-prong strategy includes more than the tokenization technique we have already discussed. In addition, businesses are practicing data minimization, i.e., only storing what is necessary and limiting access and permissions solely to those staff members who need to have them.
Moreover, they are harnessing the power of technology to implement what is known as validated point-to-point encryption (vP2PE) that masks patient data from the time of entry until it is received by the payment processor. This technology helps to protect information against data breaches and aids in compliance with measures such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
The dawn of online pharmacies.
Healthcare is also seeing an upsurge in the influence of online pharmacies, and related providers who help to streamline the patient experience and provide expanded remote access to prescription medications.
Thanks to their partnerships with a payment processor for online pharmacies, these internet-based dispensaries can fill prescriptions and even partner with providers to diagnose health conditions.
As a patient-centered provider who works hard to protect the welfare of each of your clients, this trend bears watching. Although the majority of these pharmacies are above board and provide acceptable diagnoses, treatments, and prescriptions, this is not the case for all.
As a caring practitioner, it is in your best interest and that of your patients to steer them toward legitimate online prescription options and to encourage them to receive direct care from you.
Enhanced integration with insurance and payments.
The prominence of the global healthcare IT market, including claims and payments processing, is skyrocketing. It will increasingly be used to simplify administrative tasks and heighten transparency.
Additionally, real-time pricing tools are coming to the fore. Instead of consulting outdated information about costs, providers can use technological innovations to assess up-to-the-minute pricing, increasing transparency and helping to make procedure costs fairer.
Secure telehealth payment processing in the healthcare sphere is evolving at a breakneck pace. Innovations in technology along with an emphasis on patient empowerment and choice are combining to create enhancements in the industry that will benefit both patients and providers.
