Collecting from your patients is easy, right?
They schedule an appointment at your facility, you provide services to them and they pay you in full before they walk out of your doors. There aren’t any other external factors at play and it’s that simple.
I’m being facetious.
Between patient pay preferences and communicating with insurance organizations on the claim side, things get a little dicey. Oh yeah, there’s also the statement designing and delivery, and collections side of the coin as well.
The reason why you get up every morning to go to work isn’t to spend the majority of your day trying to collect money from your patients. Hippocrates probably never had to think about his patients paying him. But, with so much involved…I’m sure it has led to many late nights for you.
You can’t just ignore the bottlenecks in your patient payment process either. Although that might feel like it’s the best option to take, collecting payment is what keeps your lights on.
There has to be a solution to this problem, right?
What if I told you that it’s not so much a matter of reworking your entire process, it’s about adding to it (spoiler alert, it’s in the title).
You need to find new ways to bring in revenue and collect outstanding balances faster. The most promising method to accomplish those two goals is by accepting online patient payments.
Maybe you’ve heard that before but still aren’t convinced. Luckily, there are so many more perks to accepting online patient payment, here are 10 of them.
Table of Contents
Perk 1: Faster Payment
Let’s say that historically you’ve only relied on the tried-and-true way to receive money from your patients, the post office. To be more specific, you print and mail your patients’ statements after their appointment and request that they pay you via cash or check in a return envelope.
Yes, it works. Yes, it’s HIPAA compliant. No, it isn’t instant.
According to the USPS, it takes 1-5 business days to deliver first-class mail. That’s a pretty large date range, but in practice, most mail arrives in the dead center of it. 94% of First-Class Mail arrives within 3 days.
In this scenario, your patient receives their statement within 3 days via mail. They also have to decide to pay it, write a check and mail it back to you. So, at a minimum, it would take 6 days before you receive payment from your patient in this example.
Guess how long it takes for your patient to receive online payment. It takes under 24 hours.
Perk 2: Boost Your Patient Collections
If you’re not accepting online patient payment, your DSO is much longer than a practice that does.
Let’s reference the scenario from the first perk. The one where you send statements and accept payment via mail. There are a lot of unknowns that could happen when your accounts receivables rely so heavily on mailing.
First, the statement could get lost in delivery. If you don’t track all of the statements you send, you wouldn’t notice what happened until 30 days later, when the account is overdue.
Second, you’ll notice that most of your patients aren’t going to receive their statement, immediately write a check and put it back in their mailbox the next business day. They’re going to go through their pile of mail, leave it on the table, spend some time reviewing it more thoroughly and then decide when to pay it. It could be days by the end of all of that.
On the flip side, accepting online patient payment enables you to send an automatic email and mobile push notifications.
But do those notifications help prompt your clients to pay? Yes.
A 2018 study found that 99% of debts are cleared by the sixth reminder.
Perk 3: Boost Patient Experience
I’m willing to bet that a handful of your patients have asked you if you accept Apple Pay. That might be what led you to this blog post.
Let me throw this statistic at you. Nearly 80% of patients want to pay off their statements electronically.
How about this one? Today’s patients now prefer convenience over loyalty (which helps explain the recent trends in telehealth).
With just two statistics, we’ve solidified the notion that online patient payment boosts their experience.
Give your clients what they want.
Perk 4: Improved Convenience
Most of your clients are already familiar with online payments because of their mortgage, cable and utility bills.
Over 60% of Americans have at least one bill on auto-pay.
Therefore, most of your patients already understand and utilize native features included with online patient payment platforms.
Perk 5: Increased Security
Online patient payment boosts the security surrounding protecting your clients’ sensitive information.
As a healthcare provider, you already have to take certain precautions regarding your client’s information because of the Healthcare Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
But by not accepting online payment, you’re still operating with unnecessary risks.
You see, the service you use to accept digital payments needs to stay in compliance with a different law altogether, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the preferred method of encryption for PCI-DSS. The highest level of AES is AES 256. If a hacker were to try and penetrate a system using AES 256, it would take billions of years to crack with today’s technology.
Perk 6: Reduce Administrative Labor
The ultimate goal of healthcare organizations is to treat patients.
Although that’s an obvious statement, the number of administrative tasks that modern healthcare professionals need to complete daily has gotten out of hand.
How out of hand? Well, many healthcare professionals have admitted to burnout. Burnout rates are so high within this industry that some are walking away from their medical careers altogether.
But, how does online patient payment reduce administrative tasks?
Remember the reminder emails and text messages I mentioned in the second perk? All of those happen as an automated campaign.
To make things even easier, many patient payment systems connect with your claims clearinghouse (like ours). That way, you don’t have to do any manual processing or data entry.
Perk 7: Competitive Advantage
At the end of the day, your healthcare organization is a business. You’re not in business to maximize revenue like massive corporations, but revenue is what keeps your doors open.
In the business world, organizations are constantly trying to come up with new strategies to get an advantage over competitors.
Accepting online payment is a competitive advantage in the healthcare space right now.
Less than one-third of patients receive medical bills electronically.
Yet, if you remember from perk 3…patients want to pay their healthcare bills digitally AND convenience is their leading decision factor.
That’s a gap that your organization could fill.
Perk 8: Greener Option
If you aren’t relying on paper as much as an organization, you’re operating with less of a carbon footprint. In the eyes of your patients, that matters.
85% of people indicate that they’ve changed their purchase behavior towards sustainability within the past five years.
65% state that they want to buy from brands that advocate sustainability.
This is another business opportunity for you.
By offering online payment, your organization saves one-tenth of a tree per year.
That might not sound like a lot, but there’s hardly any effort on your part. It’s just a matter of finding the right partner and opting in.
Perk 9: Greater Payment Acceptance
Online patient payment platforms already accept the most popular vendors from the most common credit card providers like Visa and Mastercard to blockchain currencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin.
Essentially, opting in with a platform makes it so that your practice accepts every payment option that your patients can come up with. It also helps you so that you won’t have to worry about the risk associated with HIPAA-compliant payment, either.
Perk 10: Reduces Theft
Sending paper statements opens your practice up to unnecessary risk.
You have no control over what happens to your paper statements once they’re in the hands of mail couriers. It could get intercepted.
Even worse, you might make an error in addressing the statement…causing it to get sent to the wrong address.
If your patient’s data gets stolen because of the risks associated with sending paper statements, they’re going to leave your organization.
Over 50% of patients state that they would switch providers after a breach of their personal information.
That stat just points to another benefit of the native level of encryption that comes with online patient payment portals.
Conclusion
Offering online patient payment has an endless pit of perks associated with it. And the perks benefit both you and your clients.
It’s also easy for you to source a solution that doesn’t require a ton of work on the onboarding side.
So there’s no reason not to be a trailblazer in healthcare and offer online payments. But, are you ready to give your patients what they want?
