Healthcare enterprises constantly handle patient payments, but how is that processing completed? Typically, your organization will use a combination of platforms and paper to complete payment processing. However, relying on outdated, confusing, or non-integrated solutions can create inefficient operations. If you want your healthcare enterprise to improve productivity, profit, and user satisfaction, you need to invest in better payment processing solutions. A tailored, streamlined solution makes sending and receiving payments easier and more accurate than ever.
Let’s take a look at how the right merchant service provider and platform can make all the difference for your healthcare enterprise.
What is enterprise payment processing?
An enterprise is a business, like your healthcare facility, that operates on a large scale across different organizations and networks. Enterprise payment processing is how your healthcare enterprise completes payments across different sources. Online transactions, in-person payments, insurance payouts, and more all need handling within your operation. These essential payments keep everything moving smoothly, and they have to work across locations and sources. Patients, government programs, and insurance companies all need payments to go through easily.
Enterprise payment processing needs to handle more than just smooth transactions. They also need to remain compliant with industry regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Patient data must seamlessly transfer between the correct parties without violating privacy regulations. If not, you could face fines and legal problems. With the right payment processing solution and enterprise payment strategy, your organization can juggle all these needs at once.
Enterprise payment processing challenges
Healthcare enterprises face lots of payment processing challenges — handling so many transactions from different sources can lead to delays and confusion. With manual entry or outdated software, you can waste valuable resources correcting errors. While your healthcare enterprise may be delivering quality patient care, you might be tied up with these payment processing challenges regularly:
- Billing complexity: Healthcare billing involves working between lots of different parties. Managing multiple payment processes and ensuring accurate reimbursement can be confusing and slow. Your enterprise might spend more money and time correcting errors, dealing with delays, and managing stock for paper billing than necessary.
- Integration issues: Often, healthcare systems use different platforms for all their electronic health records (EHR), practice management systems (PMS), electronic medical records (EMR), billing, and payment processing. Making these systems work together can be inefficient and challenging, leading to data issues and slow processes.
- Regulatory compliance: All U.S. healthcare organizations have to comply with strict regulations like HIPAA. Trying to protect patient data and financial information without an enterprise solution can leave your organization with slow processing and compliance issues. You need strong security measures to protect sensitive information and remain compliant.
- Patient confusion: Getting patients to understand and participate in your payment processing solution can be difficult. Complex bills, lack of transparency, and limited payment options can confuse patients and make them dissatisfied with your services. If patients have trouble with your platforms, they’ll go elsewhere for healthcare services. With the right service, you can receive onboarding assistance to make training staff easier and enable them to assist patients with understanding the new processes more quickly.
- Scalability: As your healthcare organization expands, you need to be able to handle the increased demand on your infrastructure. Implementing scalable solutions is essential for keeping payment processes easy and fast.
- Manual data entry: Healthcare facilities often rely on manual data entry to process their payments. This process is very slow and often leads to errors. Your enterprise will have to spend time and labor fixing discrepancies in patient billing caused by manual data entry delays.
- Modernizing the patient experience: Many traditional payment processing strategies are outdated, burdening patients with inconvenient payment processing experiences. Modernizing can help with this, but many healthcare facilities struggle to modernize payment processing. Figuring out the best modernizing solution and making it work with your existing systems can be challenging, consuming time and money as you try to find the right options.
Benefits of modernized payment processing for enterprises
The healthcare industry deals with hundreds of moving parts daily. Having an effective strategy or solution for your payment processing can help make your operation more efficient and effective. You’ll improve patient care and partner satisfaction when you invest in quality payment processing solutions. Here are some of the benefits quality enterprise merchant services can offer your healthcare operation:
- Reducing accounts receivables: Automated payment processing solutions can significantly reduce your accounts receivables by streamlining the payment process. A faster invoicing and payment collection cycle means reducing the time it takes to receive payments from insurance providers and patients, minimizing your outstanding accounts receivable. These systems can send out reminders for outstanding payments, encouraging faster settlements while decreasing the number of overdue accounts.
- Ensuring cash flow: Having efficient payment processing systems means increasing transaction speeds. Your enterprise can receive payments faster, boosting cash flow and helping you manage finances more easily. With your facility receiving payments more quickly, you’ll have more cash on hand to put back into your operation.
- Better patient experience: Patients are at the heart of any healthcare enterprise. With lots of payment options and a smooth payment process, you can enhance the patient experience. Patients want the convenience of paying online or setting up payment plans easily.
- Streamlined billing: Payment processing solutions simplify your operation’s payment process. Healthcare operations handle hundreds of payment types every day. With payment processing solutions, you can automate tasks like generating statements and invoices, reducing errors and freeing up staff.
- Improved security: Payment processing solutions put security first, helping you stay compliant with security regulations. When you’re dealing with sensitive patient data, security is critical. These systems use security measures like encryption to protect data from fraud and breaches, keeping your enterprise compliant.
- Increased savings: Using a payment processing solution can help you automate tasks and minimize errors, saving you money in the long term. With less need for paper-based systems, you’ll also save money on postage and printing costs.
- Scalable services: The right processing solution can easily scale to handle your growing needs. Getting a platform tailored for enterprise healthcare operations allows you to adjust with your operations, growing with your increased volume. You’ll easily handle more patient payments without creating delays.
- Smooth integration: Many payment processing solutions seamlessly integrate with your EHR, EMR, and PMS systems. This easy integration improves coordination between record-keeping, payments and patient care, ensuring accurate billing and taking the strain off your administration. Using a tailored processing solution helps you integrate your systems and payment processing without stress — you can enjoy a guided start-up and seamless cooperation between all your different platforms.
How to elevate your enterprise payment strategy
The right payment processing solution can help advance your operation’s efficiency and satisfaction. By leveraging a tailored solution like Practice Management Bridge®, you can streamline operations, improve patient experiences, and ensure compliance with ease.
Practice Management Bridge® lets you manage patients, practices, and data across multiple locations seamlessly. With all-in-one functionality, you can enhance the patient experience, simplify administrative tasks, and increase your cash flow. Consolidating essential healthcare functions into one platform allows your teams to work more efficiently and provide better patient care.
Practice Management Bridge® brings all your teams, tools, and data together, prioritizing collaborations and quick decision-making. Through easy integration with existing software, you’ll boost efficiency, visibility, and profitability. This platform gives you a solution tailored to your enterprise’s needs and scale. You’ll give your organization the tools it needs to successfully protect and elevate patient care in a changing healthcare landscape.
Effective enterprise solutions from Rectangle Health
Are you ready to streamline your healthcare operations and boost profitability? Request a demo today to discover how Rectangle Health can make your enterprise payment processing simple. As a trusted leader in innovative healthcare technology, you can count on us to support you as you grow. With over 36,000 healthcare providers already relying on our comprehensive platform, Practice Management Bridge®, we’re here to help you streamline your daily business operations.
Our easy-to-use and scalable payment processing solution will help you increase productivity, boost profit, and enhance the patient experience. Avoid inefficiencies and take your next step with Rectangle Health today!
References
- (OCR), O. for C. R. (2022, October 20). Summary of the HIPAA security rule. HHS.gov. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/laws-regulations/index.html
