Why Payment Automation is a Must for Practices in 2025
If your office processes payments manually, you could miss opportunities for faster collections, higher patient satisfaction, and reduced administrative work. Payment automation speeds up revenue collection while freeing staff from paperwork. It also offers patients the simple, digital transactions they want.
The Shift Toward Convenience and Speed
Patients expect paying for their care to be as simple as retail transactions, whether they’re in person or online. With 83% of millennial patients preferring digital payments, practices that adopt systems with multiple payment options will collect payments faster and keep their patients happier.
The Administrative Burden of Manual Billing
Processing paper statements can place a heavy workload on staff. Manual data entry of payments and follow-ups require time that could be redirected to patient care. By automating these processes, your team can reduce errors and accelerate payment collection while focusing on more valuable tasks.
Tactic #1: Use Text-to-Pay for Faster Payments
Manual payment follow ups can consume staff time and energy while slowing cash flow. Text-to-Pay transforms this frustrating process into an automated system that collects many payments within minutes of sending, letting your team focus on patient care rather than payment follow-ups.
How Text-to-Pay Works
With Text-to-Pay, patients receive a secure text message containing their balance due and a payment link. They can complete their payment instantly from their phone without needing to create an account or remember login credentials, making the process effortless and convenient.
And if your practice has aging accounts receivable, Bulk Text-to-Pay lets you send payment requests to multiple patients – up to 5,000 – simultaneously.
Results that Speak for Themselves
Text-to-Pay works! One group reported reducing their accounts receivable from $8 million to under $3 million in just 18 months after implementing Text-to-Pay. Another healthcare practice reported collecting $350,000 in payments within 2 hours of sending a bulk text reminder.
Other results practices using Text-to-Pay have seen include:
- A 65% decrease in accounts receivable
- A 30% reduction in time spent collecting and posting payments
- 25% less time spent on payment reconciliation
How to Get Started
Every practice has unique needs, so it’s important to understand the particular opportunities Text-to-Pay offers your organization. To get started:
- Choose the right platform: Research payment platforms offering comprehensive patient payment capabilities, looking specifically for solutions that include individual and Bulk Text-to-Pay features.
- Prepare your team: Once you’ve selected your vendor, train your staff on the system’s features and best practices for sending payment reminders.
- Engage your patients: Finally, communicate with your patients about this new convenient payment option through multiple channels to ensure high adoption rates.
Tactic #2: Store Cards on File
Busy patients appreciate faster checkout options and efficient payment processes, which keep your front desk staff focused on patient care. A card on file solution securely stores payment information, facilitating faster checkouts and automatic payments while maintaining strict security standards.
Why it Works
A card on file solution lets patients breeze through the checkout process by securely storing their preferred payment method. This eliminates the hassle of re-entering payment information and automates payment plans and recurring charges, saving significant staff time on billing and follow ups.
Proven Results
Practices that implement card on file systems report up to a 97% improvement in time-of-service collections, with some saving “tens of thousands of dollars in staff time” previously spent on monthly payment processing.
How to Implement this Tactic
Ready to implement a card on file solution? First, select a payment platform that offers PCI-compliant card storage and integrates with your practice management system. Then, communicate the convenience to patients, letting them know they can save their preferred payment method for faster checkouts and automated payment plans – all while their information remains securely encrypted and protected.
Tactic #3: Set up Recurring Payment Plans
With rising healthcare costs, patients may hesitate to move forward with necessary treatment due to financial concerns. Recurring payment plans remove these barriers by making care more affordable through flexible monthly payments. They help patients say “yes” to treatment while providing your practice with reliable, predictable cash flow.
Why Patients Love Payment Plans
Payment plans empower patients to proceed with necessary treatment by breaking down high costs into manageable monthly installments. This approach makes healthcare more accessible and affordable, removing the stress of large upfront payments that often cause patients to postpone essential treatment.
The Business Benefits of Recurring Payments
Set up and managed by the practice, automated payment plans deliver steady, reliable revenue while eliminating the need for manual payment processing. The system automatically handles collections, cutting administrative costs and freeing your staff from time-consuming payment tracking and follow-ups.
How to Offer Payment Plans
Getting started with payment plans requires the right technology and the right patient approach. Select a payment processing platform that supports recurring payments and helps you manage installment schedules. Then, train your team to present payment plans during treatment discussions, emphasizing how monthly payments can make recommended care more affordable and accessible.
Tactic #4: Enable 24/7 Online Bill Pay
Limiting the acceptance of payment collections to office hours may delay collections. Online bill pay lets your patients control when and how they settle their balances, creating a more convenient experience that gets you paid faster.
Why 24/7 Payment Options are Essential
Research shows that 83% of millennial patients prefer to pay their bills online — meaning that offering digital payment options is a must. Online payment options let your practice continue collecting payments around the clock, accelerating cash flow and reducing the administrative burden of payment processing.
Ways to Enable 24/7 Payments
Your practice can provide multiple convenient payment access points:
- Add QR codes to billing statements for instant mobile payments.
- Send secure payment links through text and email.
- Offer a dedicated payment link on your practice website.
Taking a multi-channel approach ensures patients can quickly settle their balances using their preferred method.
How to Get Started
To get started with online bill pay, choose a payment platform that offers comprehensive digital payment options and integrates with your practice management software. Once your system is in place, incorporate digital payment access points — like QR codes and payment links — into your patient communications to make online payments easily accessible.
Tactic #5: Use Automatic Payment Posting to Keep Accounts Accurate
Manual payment entry can consume valuable staff time and increase the potential for billing errors. Automatic payment posting eliminates these tedious administrative tasks while ensuring your patient ledger stays accurate and up to date, letting your team focus on what matters most — patient care.
The Cost of Manual Account Updates
Manually entering payments and reconciling accounts takes time and can shift staff focus away from patient care. In addition to consuming valuable hours, manual data entry increases the risk of errors that can lead to billing confusion and delayed payments, affecting patient satisfaction and your practice’s cash flow.
Benefits of Automatic Posting
When payments are automatically posted to patient accounts, your practice management system shows current balances in real time. This accuracy reduces billing confusion and eliminates the need for manual reconciliation.
The system also creates an automatic audit trail, making it easier to track payments and resolve discrepancies.
How to Automate Payment Posting
To implement automated posting, ensure you select a payment platform that seamlessly integrates with your practice management system, automatically posting post payments to the patient ledger. The system should allow you to automatically reconcile and handle all payment data entry, eliminating manual work while maintaining a clear audit trail of every transaction.
How to Choose the Right Payment Automation Tools
When evaluating payment automation solutions, insist on a comprehensive system that includes all five tactics in one integrated platform.
Your payment automation solution should include the following:
- Text-to-Pay functionality with bulk-sending capabilities.
- Secure card storage compliant with industry standards.
- Flexible recurring payment options.
- 24/7 online payment access.
- Automatic posting to your practice management system.
Questions to Ask Payment Providers
To make an informed decision about your payment automation platform, you must ask the right questions during the evaluation process. Before selecting a provider, ask questions like:
- Integration capabilities: Can this system integrate with my current PMS/EMR and automatically post payments to the patient ledger?
- Security and compliance: Is the system secure and PCI-compliant, and does it meet all HIPAA requirements for protecting patient data?
- Total cost of ownership: Are there setup fees or hidden costs beyond standard transaction fees?
- Support structure: What kind of training, implementation assistance, and ongoing technical support do you provide for practices?
Streamline Your Practice with Payment Automation
Payment automation streamlines collections, reduces administrative work, and improves the patient experience. By implementing these five tactics now, you’ll collect payments faster, free your staff from manual tasks, and give patients the convenient payment options they expect.
Bridge™ Payments makes it easy to implement all of these strategies in your facility with powerful tools designed specifically for healthcare practices. Ready to learn more about how Bridge Payments can streamline your practice’s payment processes? Get in touch today for a demo.
