By implementing an inclusive solution for all your patient’s non-clinical needs, you can boost their satisfaction and engagement to help drive revenue for your facility. Today, healthcare organizations can stay on top of the latest digital trends by providing multiple ways for patients to interact and engage with them, especially when it’s time to pay copays or bills. 

A unified patient solution can make your most essential processes — including receiving payments — much more efficient, from pre-arrival to post-visit. Below, we’ll review the advantages of digital payments and how you implement this type of payment solution in your practice to enhance patient engagement. 

1. Improve Patient Satisfaction
2. Offers a More Streamlined Workflow
3. Simplifies Record Keeping
4. Enhances Revenue Cycle Management
5. Provides a Modern Check-Out Experience

What Are Digital Payments and How Do

They Work?

Digital payments, often called electronic payments or e-payments, refer to the transfer of money from one account to another using digital payment technologies, like mobile payment apps or mobile wallets. Mobile wallet options simply require customers to tap their mobile devices on a payment terminal.

E-payments occur through devices like mobile phones or computers and can also be conducted online. These payments include any transaction using:

• Credit and debit cards
• Mobile money 
• Bank transfers  
• Another method that does not involve hard cash 

Debit and credit cards today come with a chip or magnetic strip that also makes it easy to tap them onto a screen at the register without patients having to physically give their card to someone. Technologies that make digital payments possible usually have machine learning or artificial intelligence capabilities that allow healthcare facilities to improve customer experiences and enhance security and fraud protection. 

Digital payments may also be referred to as mobile payments or contactless payment solutions, which many businesses have been using for years. However, these touch-free payments grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic because they reduced contact with others. 

One survey found that 25% of healthcare consumers preferred using digital pay options, and 23% preferred their provider’s online portal due to concern of infection. More than 50% of Americans use some form of mobile payment today, making it a popular form of payment for organizations to implement. 

5 Ways Your Practice Can Benefit From Offering Digital Payments

As new technological advancements lead more and more healthcare facilities to transition to digital platforms, it’s important for your practice to know the value of these solutions. These benefits of digital healthcare payments can transform the way your facility engages with patients. 

1. Improves Patient Satisfaction

Efficient patient communication is one of the most important aspects of boosting patient satisfaction, and digital payments improve practice and patient communication. The easier it is for patients to interact with your facility and access various payment options, the more likely you will enhance their patient journey. 

Offering digital payments provides convenience and ease for your patients — and employees — and gives them a more positive experience at your facility. One-third of healthcare patients are unsatisfied with their provider’s digital billing process and would be willing to switch providers if they had a disappointing experience with digital pre-appointment forms, online bill pay and mobile and email bill delivery. Simply put, practices can’t afford to lose patients who are frustrated with inefficient billing and payment processes. 

Allowing your patients to make payments with their smartphone or through another digital payment tool can make it easier to collect outstanding balances and offer a competitive advantage — all while helping you retain patients. 

2. Offers a More Streamlined Workflow

Healthcare digital payments and mobile pay options mean more than convenience for your patients. They also mean an enhanced workflow for you and your staff. Healthcare practices have many responsibilities to juggle and don’t have extra time or resources to waste on inefficient processes. The traditional billing workflow, however, is incredibly tedious, time-consuming and manually intensive. 

Inefficiencies like mailing bills, sending outstanding accounts to collections or allocating front office resources to collect in-person payments lead to delays. Spending too much time on repetitive paperwork and documentation can hinder patient care and satisfaction rates. 

Likewise, the more complicated your payment process is, the more likely your patients may put it off or forget about it. Integrating an end-to-end solution for patient payments can make invoicing and other payment tasks more straightforward while giving patients plenty of ways to pay their bills right from their phones. 

Whether your patients want to view their statements, access payment plan options or use a text-to-pay feature, implementing these features can take the administrative burden off your staff. 

3. Simplifies Record Keeping 

Digital payment options make record keeping at healthcare practices much simpler. With manual processes, your facility risks constant human errors and delays. Up to 80% of healthcare billing contains errors, which can be costly to resolve. Mobile payments empower you to quickly create a digital invoice, send it to a patient and collect payment in one system to reduce under-billing, over-billing and other coding errors. 

This seamless transaction eliminates the need to manually track patients to ensure they’ve been invoiced or have paid. Healthcare staff can reduce their additional communication to address long-outstanding charges and focus on providing care and improving the patient journey. 

With a digital payment platform, your billing managers will have more visibility into the payment process through a central location. There, employees can check billing status, improving efficiency and the overall patient experience. 

4. Enhances Revenue Cycle Management 

While improving the patient journey and building better engagement through digital services boost patient satisfaction, these solutions should also help your practice receive prompt payments. Mobile pay makes it easier for practices to see payment for services without having to track down patients to pay their bills. 

Sometimes, healthcare practices need a quicker and easier way to create invoices, bill patients and accept digital payments. When your patients receive their bills faster and have access to simplified payment options, your facility will likely see a reduction in days in accounts receivable (DAR). 

The DAR for healthcare practices generally ranges from 30 to 70 days, but many experts say more than 50 days indicates a significant problem with billing or collection processes. It can be challenging to meet your operational goals if you aren’t collecting payments from patients promptly. 

Mobile solutions make it possible to communicate with patients through messages and send notifications or reminders for balances due, making it easy for them to click a secure link and make a payment. 

5. Provides a Modern Check-Out Experience

In the modern age of technology, your patients expect a better check-out experience. Patients are used to digital features that make healthcare visits more convenient and efficient. With mobile payment through a unified healthcare platform, you can reduce the time your patients spend in the waiting room before and after their appointments. 

Instead of patients waiting in line to make a payment in the office, they can easily send payments during pre- and post-care from their mobile devices while they’re in the exam room or wait until they’re in the comfort of their own home. This can free up front desk staff from feeling overwhelmed with administrative tasks.

Millennia Makes Healthcare Digital

Payments Easier 

Providing new ways for your patients to interact with your practice and pay their balances can do so much more than speed up the check-out process. At Millennia, it’s our mission to build digital engagement, increase revenue for providers and create better patient journeys by enhancing usability for patients and practices. With our Millennia Patient Payment Solution  solution, you gain access to a comprehensive, connected ecosystem that can increase revenue and give your patients several digital payment options for completing their healthcare payments. 

Millennia Patient Payment Solution also makes the post-visit segment of the patient journey faster and more convenient with patient engagement services, payment plan flexibility, patient responsibility billing and self-pay billing. To enhance the entire patient journey, you can employ both our Millennia Patient Payment Solution and Pre-arrival Module  solutions through the comprehensive Millennia Patient Payment Solution system, which empowers your organization to gain engagement intelligence to improve scheduling, pre-arrival tasks and post-arrival services. Request a consultation with us today to learn more.