Consolidating payments for healthcare systems

In a competitive marketplace, healthcare providers are consolidating payments systems to deliver a better patient experience and improve the financial health of their organizations. Here’s why payments consolidation matters and a few strategies that can help.

In the current healthcare landscape, patients are covering more medical care costs out-of-pocket — and providers need that revenue to maintain cash flow. Patients are becoming more savvy healthcare consumers and providers are looking for ways to connect more effectively with their patients and create an experience that increases timely payments. If you’re considering consolidating payments, here are five strategies that can help.

1. Build a consistent experience

As in other business sectors, creating an intuitive, engaging, easy-to-use healthcare payment system increases positive interactions. A successful payment platform reduces complexity for patients by simplifying interactions and tasks, increasing familiarity and building consumer satisfaction and loyalty. Consolidating payments also helps staff by reducing the burden of manual processing, reporting and reconciling payments.

2. Understand expectations and set goals

In consolidating payments, is your goal to reduce payment friction for healthcare consumers, or implement more flexible payment options (recurring payments, point-of-sale lending, lump sum discounts)? Do you need to integrate a new payment solution with a current electronic medical record (EMR) system? Understanding the needs and goals of all stakeholders, including patients, the workforce, technology departments and leadership can help you find a healthcare payment system that provides a simple, effective solution for patients and staff.

3. Minimize redundancies

Large healthcare organizations saw checks used as a payment method only 38% of the time in 2024, compared with 60% in 2023.¹ As digital payments increase, it’s important to transform payments to optimize workflow and processes. To do that, identify gaps in your current acceptance channels and processes to understand how to create a more effective healthcare payment solution. Reducing overlap and decreasing manual processing reduces error and gives administrators insight into pertinent metrics and cash flow.

4. Minimize risk

Healthcare providers store sensitive patient medical, personal and financial data, making them frequent cybercrime targets. In 2023, only 55% of offices strongly agreed they were doing everything possible to protect patient personal data.¹ To address this deficiency, involve your technology team in developing, integrating and testing a payments consolidation solution that lessens security risks by streamlining vendors and processes. The team can help ensure your technology infrastructure is secure and able to monitor updates and protocols.

5. Train staff

Your staff are on the frontline of patient payments processing. It’s critical that everyone, from customer service representatives and pharmacists to accounting and insurance verification staff, receives comprehensive training on your new payment platform. Building their expertise and proficiency leads to success by improving day-to-day operations and enhancing the patient experience.

Our dedicated healthcare industry team understands your unique challenges. Partner with us to find ways we can improve patient experience, consolidate payments and sustain organizational revenue. Learn more about our Healthcare Payment Solutions or contact us to speak with a healthcare payments consultant.