Visits to the vet’s office are often stressful, but online payment can make the experience easier for pet parents, the clinic, and the animals themselves. It means less time spent at checkout and fewer headaches for customers who are already dealing a sick or nervous pet. Online payment software can enable a wide range of convenient tools that also help the practice by reducing demands for the staff.
Veterinary payment systems are a crucial part of any clinic, and the right one can include a host of useful resources. Let’s explore the advantages of online payment software for veterinary practices.
What Is Practice Management and Online Payment Software?
As the name implies, practice management software helps you manage your practice. Payments and scheduling are two primary functions, but these platforms can also help with accepting and storing digital forms, communicating with patients, and providing flexible payment plans. Payment software lets you digitize most, if not all, of these functions, supporting a fully paperless practice.
Veterinary practices use this kind of software to:
- Offer more payment options: Practice management software can enable online, contactless, and text-based payments. Some, like the Practice Management Bridge®, also support payment plans to make your services easier to pay for.
- Digitize forms and payments: Paper forms and payments call for staff members to process them. They also need storage space and can create additional risks of loss, theft, and damage. With a fully digital solution, vet teams can focus more on their customers and less on mundane paperwork.
- Mitigate risk from cyber attacks: When you store customer data, you have a responsibility to keep it safe. Practice management software uses the expertise of cybersecurity professionals to protect information from data breaches and other attacks.
- Comply with regulations: Software can help you meet payment and practice regulations by providing secure technology and audit-ready platforms. If anyone needs to see your records, they are ready to go.
Customers in any industry demand convenient, secure payment options, and pet owners are no different. As these technologies become more widely available in other environments, like retail stores and medical offices, many customers expect to see them at the vet’s office, too. Some will even consider switching to another provider that offers more versatile payment options.
The Benefits of Online Payment Software for Veterinary Clinics
Online veterinary payment software benefits everyone involved — including your staff, your furry patients, and their owners. Some of the advantages you can expect include:
1. Improved Customer Experiences
Online payments can take the complexity out of the transaction. When taking a pet to the vet’s office, most people are focused on making the animal more comfortable. They want to get in and out quickly. Online, stored, or contactless payments can help them finish the process quickly. It eliminates a cumbersome part of visiting the vet and gives the provider more room to focus on the pet.
A comprehensive practice management platform can also minimize time spent in the office with digital registration capabilities. Instead of juggling a stressed-out dog and rushing to fill out pages on a clipboard, the owner can fill out their information at home.
2. Security Against Cyberattacks and Fraud
Dedicated billing software puts industry-standard platforms and expertise on your side. It can protect you and your customers with up-to-date technology that keeps data safe and monitors for potential fraud. Your solution should offer compliance with major standards, like those from the Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Europay, MasterCard®, and Visa® (EMV).
Other useful security technologies include:
- Address Verification System (AVS): An AVS matches a payer’s billing address with the one their credit card issuer has on file to help confirm their identity and prevent fraud.
- Tokenization: This system lets you securely store payment information for later use, such as automatic or recurring payment plans.
- Point-to-point encryption (P2PE): This kind of encryption keeps data encrypted as it moves from your network to ours, only being decrypted when it reaches a secure point. Encryption prevents any intercepted data from being readable by a third party.
3. Flexible Payment Options
While routine visits are usually manageable, many pet parents struggle to pay for unexpected treatments, like ingested foreign objects or cancer. These treatments can quickly reach thousands of dollars and can lead to heartbreaking decisions for some owners who can’t pay it upfront. Flexible payment plans can make a massive difference in their ability to afford care and keep their pets happy and healthy.
Billing solutions for veterinary practices can help you offer these options, including payment plans and recurring payments. You can establish plans that suit nearly any budget or situation so your customers can confidently care for their pets without experiencing undue financial stress. You can even implement a third-party solution that eliminates financial risk for the practice and integrates with your management platform while offering near-universal approval.
4. Paperless Transactions
Paper-based payments can be slow, hard to store, and difficult to manage. If you’re looking for ways to improve veterinary practice efficiency, digitizing your system is an excellent tactic. A digital solution offers a major upgrade, providing secure payments complete with electronic signatures and receipts. You can easily search through receipts for previous payments and generate reports for accounting. It’s faster for customers and providers, allowing you to eliminate manual processing requirements and focus on your customers.
5. Cost Savings
Between higher customer satisfaction, seamless integrations, fewer labor requirements, and fewer errors, veterinary practices can expect significant savings. A strong practice management platform can offer a high return on investment and help you bring in more revenue to focus on your practice’s goals.
How Rectangle Health can help your practice
At Rectangle Health, we’ve created practice management solutions designed to serve providers and customers, including those with four legs and fur. Through our Practice Management Bridge®, we offer a wide range of management tools and a robust payment platform. Streamline checkout and spend more time on your customers with features like:
- Card-on-file (CoF) payments: Secure card-on-file systems allow you to store payment information and use it as needed for recurring and automated payments and easy, card-free checkout.
- Mobile, online, and Text-to-Pay options: Versatile payment options — including online payment links delivered via SMS messages — can help you offer more convenience and minimize stress at the reception area.
- Flexible payment options: With fully customizable payment plans and third-party options, you can provide financing that suits your customers without adding increasing risk to the practice.
- Digital form submission: Let customers submit information without rushing from the comfort of their homes. Then, store the documents safely in the Practice Management Bridge®.
- Patient communication and scheduling: Our platform can also help you get in touch with customers through appointment reminders, messaging, and easy scheduling.
Contact us today to find the best practice management software for your veterinary practice
In North America, less than 3% of pet owners have pet insurance (NAPHIA, 2022), so a vet’s ability to improve affordability can make all the difference. The right veterinary practice management solution can provide flexible payment options that suit customers and providers and provide a range of other convenient benefits, like CoF payments, improved security, and efficiency. We’ll tailor our services to your practice’s unique needs.
Reach out to us to learn more about the Practice Management Bridge®, or request a demo today!
* The Patient Financing program provides nearly 100% approval. Applicants determined to be in Open Bankruptcy, Fraud Alert or on the Terrorist Watch List during the application process will be declined. Patients covered by government payor programs for a procedure are not eligible for financing of that procedure. Government payer programs include Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the Department of Defense TRICARE and TRICARE for Life programs (DOD TRICARE), the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) program, and the Indian Health Service (IHS) program.
References
- Kilroy, A. (2023, March 29). How much does a vet visit cost? Forbes. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/advisor/pet-insurance/pet-care/how-much-does-vet-visit-cost/
- NAPHIA. (2022, June 1). Total pets insured – NAPHIA state of the industry report. NAPHIA. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://naphia.org/industry-data/section-2-total-pets-insured/
