2016 Trade Show Trending Topics

It’s trade show season here at Corral! That means we’re traveling the country and getting to know our fellow payments enthusiasts, showing off Corral, and discussing recent payment pain points among medical practices. We’ve compiled a simple list of the most talked about pain points we discovered at trade shows this month including: credit cards on file, payment at the point of care, and payment collections!

Pain Point 1: My patients don’t want my practice to keep their credit card on file

Security is a huge topic in the healthcare industry right now. Patients are worried about their personal data being hacked and providers are worried about the cost of possible ransomware. These are both justified concerns. Because the healthcare industry is being targeting by hackers, patients are not as likely to want to keep any of their personal payment information on record. However, keeping a credit card on file in your practice is a really easy and convenient way to make sure your practice gets paid at the point of care. If your solutions provider uses a secure program that tokenizes credit card information and locks it away off of your office servers – let your clients know! You may also consider adding in authorization to keep a credit card on file to your Patient Responsibility Form. Most importantly though, is making sure your patients feel safe and comfortable when handing over their payment information.

Pain Point 2: Asking for payment during the patient visit is awkward

As a provider, your schedule is pretty packed. We talked to some physical therapists during a show who are having trouble collecting payments because the responsibility falls on them to ask! The PT is then having to extend the appointment by a few minutes every time to both ask for and process the patient’s payment for that day. Now the following appointment is starting late and the physical therapist is put in an unnecessary position in asking for payments. This scenario can be easily avoided by using your front office staff and appointment scheduler request a method of payment up front. When the patient arrives, payment should be collected at check in with the front desk. This way, the appointment begins and ends on time and the provider can focus on the physical health of the patient.

Pain Point 3: Patients aren’t paying – even after we send 3 paper statements!

Lastly, we know very well that collecting payments in a timely matter can be difficult. That’s why when we talk to providers who are forced to hire people to make collection phone calls (after 3 mailed statements!) it makes us a little sad. Time and money are being spent by so many practices just to get paid for their services. Your practice is busy, and you shouldn’t have to spend extra money to hire payments staff, and extra time tracking down a long lost patient payment. We recommend going mobile. Email notifications for patient payments are becoming more mainstream and are an easier way for your patients to pay their bills on the go. Plus, your practice no longer has to send out paper statement after paper statement to collect a payment. A simple email with a link to a payment portal is an easy, convenient, and more cost-effective way to make sure your patients are paying their bills on time.

Hopefully these tips can help make collecting payments in your practice easier and more patient focused. Stay tuned for more hot topics from tradeshow season! To find out even more about the topics we covered here, contact us at hello@corralsolutions.com or on the contact page of our website!