As any healthcare provider or collection agency for healthcare knows, HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which is a 1996 Federal law that restricts access to individuals’ private medical information.

Due to the dramatic increase in the volume of patient responsibility, many hospitals are receiving more self-pay patients. These patients have high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) which means more out-of-pocket expenses for the patient. The problem is that many of the patients have difficulty paying their bills. In fact, a recent study showed that hospitals can expect to lose 65 cents on every dollar collected.

When you are building your collections agency you will need a merchant account. As you will find out when you examine the offerings, there are a lot of them on the market, all claiming that they can help you. The question is: how do you know if they can work well with your business? Can you trust them to manage data, work with your systems and avoid problems that can seriously impact your business? In some instances the answer to this question is ‘no’.

According to BillingTree’s 2016 Healthcare Operations and Technology Survey, 93.3% of the surveyed healthcare providers collect payments in the form of checks or money orders. While this helps your patients make payments, it is adding significantly to your bottom line costs. A wise move for health care providers would be to begin to migrate their clients to online payment methods as quickly as possible. Why? Because accepting paper checks has several downsides.

The internet has brought many different methods of collecting payments from consumers. It also has brought many different methods of communication as well. Social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter as well as text messages are currently the main means a majority of people communicate online.

In BillingTree’s recent 2016 Healthcare Operations and Technology Survey, healthcare providers were asked what payment options they currently offer their patients. “Onsite and mail” was the top method at 93% and “via agent over the phone” was second at 87%. “Via Interactive Voice Response (IVR)” was a distant third place; only 6.7% of respondents use an IVR system. In addition, only 13.3% of the respondents stated that they were planning to implement an IVR system in the next year to help their...

In BillingTree’s recent 2016 Healthcare Operations and Technology Survey, healthcare providers were asked what options related to patient payments they were planning to add within the next 12 months. One of the top responses was “third-party collections” at 26.7%.

If you own a small collection agency or credit union and are considering adding online payment acceptance, you have probably heard the terms payment gateway and payment processor and wondered what the difference is between the two. Payment gateways and payment processors are two key links in the payment processing chain.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of using social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook to market your business. Using these tools is no longer a luxury; it has become an absolute business necessity. Facebook alone is huge: As of the second quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.71 billion monthly active users and they experience growth of 17% annually. Because of this, it is important that your business uses social media to market to new clients to attract them to your credit union. Here...

NOTE: This information is not intended to be legal advice and may not be used as legal advice. Legal advice must be tailored to the specific circumstances of each case.