Merchant Services For Healthcare [4 Signs To Look For]

Somewhere in the world, a doctor or a health care expert would be giving a patient a lecture about staying at bay from their annoying habit of not giving trouble symptoms the needed attention. Even after experiencing shortness of breath, pain, problem in focusing and other unpleasant experiences, the patient was expecting to get better on their own.

Attending the problem on time helps with timely & faster treatment. Moreover, the situation turns less painful, highly effective and less costly. This thing happens with the health practitioner too in terms of their revenue cycle. Owing to the tremendous changes in the healthcare sector, old school standard processes have changed into liabilities. Regular warnings related to the need to take action is a good thing. Out of the most effective responses in revenue cycle hurdles, merchant services are one. Other than this, there are certain signs such as technology based approach to payment processing for hospitals to take advantage of.

1. Cash Posting

There’s no doubt that healthcare payments are complicated. Increase in patient financial responsibility is making it even obvious. Patients pay at various stages of the treatment and accounts are fixed through various plans. In few cases, additional level of complication is added by the third-party payers, especially with cash posting.
Troubles with unposted or mis-posted cash, mistakes from multiple inputs and falling down of cash poster efficiency are indications of the need to have merchant services.
Apart from automating bulk cash posting and reconciliation functions, merchant services free plenty of hours per cash every week and open gates for team flexibility to let the organization respond to revenue cycle challenges in a better way.

2. Increase of Bad Debt

Patients signify a top-tier payer for a number of organizations and this could be the worst nightmare for collections rates of the hospital. As compared to insurance companies, patients cost twice to collect and three times to pay. There’s no doubt that this creates burden on the administrative front. However, it also represents collection of lower proportion of entire revenue.

When bad debt numbers grow, merchant services are the best technology considerations to trust. Other than simplifying administrative burdens, it provides more options to the patients to settle the bills.

3. Patient Satisfaction

Patients are top-tier; hence, their satisfaction is above everything. Satisfaction of patient is a multi-faceted factor and is influenced by everything from clinical experiences to facility design. One of the fundamental aspects behind satisfaction is financial experience of the patient. Drop in satisfaction numbers is a good thing and merchant services provide a mind-blowing opportunity.

Patients expect both flexibility and customer-oriented experiences in every service they take and healthcare is no exception. To keep the customers happy, these industries depend on merchant services; therefore, to score patient experience points, an integrated merchant services solution is the driving force to expected patient satisfaction outcomes.

4. Patient Mix Skews Older

Preferred mode of payment differs across certain factors; however, age and salary are the two main factors. For instance, CreditCards.com has found that debit cards are favorite of those who have income up to $50,000; whereas, credit are choice of those who earn over $75,000.

Same thing happens with age as well. Younger people are use to make payments through debit card and credit gets importance around the age of 35.

Conclusion here is that in specific populations, more flexibility and dependable credit card options are needed. Thus, it is good to observe the patient demographics while checking what all is possible through merchant services.
With each passing day, there comes an opportunity to focus on the signs and know more about the potential of merchant services-enabled revenue cycle.