One thing that unfortunately isn’t a surprise these days is the fact that people in the U.S. pay a huge amount for health care—patients themselves are responsible for over $63 billion in charges each year. What you might be surprised about is how much of that goes unpaid each year. One survey suggested that as much as $7 billion, or 11% of that amount, simply goes unpaid. For the healthcare professional, especially smaller providers, this poses a great challenge to business. It becomes essential for healthcare offices to find the best way to provide options that serve their patients with care and dignity—but to also get paid themselves in the process.
Payment plans, historically, tend to be used as a last resort by providers: as a way to get something rather than nothing from the defaulting patients. There is evidence, however, that if given the opportunity to use payment plans, many more would be interested. It probably doesn’t have to be explained that making your patients (customers) happy is a good business decision, but there’s more that might persuade a small business to include a payment plan as part of their healthcare payment solutions. It is true that paying in full is more desirable for a company than a payment plan, but there are more moving parts to the equation. Having a payment plan option may enable a person who would otherwise delay paying their bill to make an initial payment without delay.
So you want to offer a payment plan to your customers, but you don’t want to open the door to all the worries that come with it, like delinquent or late payments. Luckily, your healthcare payment solution can help. Here’s how: recurring payments. With third party applications that can be integrated with your patient management system, you are able to set up a simple recurring payment schedule that will take the pressure off your patients, while also saving you from the ignoble task of payment chasing. As a business, you may be able to incentivize the prospect of signing up for automatic payments by offering a 5% discount. If it saves your staff from the man-hours of phone calls and so on, it’s worth it.
The whole point of payment options, including the decision to offer the option of a payment plan, is to make sure you remove as many barriers as possible from the payment process of your clients. Moolah and our collaboration with Poynt make a great foundation upon which to build a payment solution that fits your company. That’s because Poynt was designed to work with more of the third-party software that helps businesses. What’s more, Moolah is partnering with healthcare payment solutions, such as the Dental Health Network. Collaboration is a huge help in building a system that works. Moolah, along with our partners, is excited to do our part in making the healthcare system just a¬ little more humane.