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What is Your Practice’s Payments Solution Really Costing You?

By: Chuck Danner | September 2nd, 2021

What is Your Practice’s Payments Solution Really Costing You? Blog Feature

While obviously providing exceptional patient care is an important goal for your practice, you are also trying to run a successful business. To accomplish this, your practice needs to be able to do what all successful businesses do—MAKE MONEY. These days, the ability to efficiently bring in revenue means having a digital payments solution. Unfortunately, when it comes to certain payment processing solutions, many practices are not getting much when you consider what they are paying.

You could be paying too much for slow, obsolete and/or restrictive hardware. You could be paying for a solution with limited mobility that makes taking payments more of chore than it should be. Your profits could be getting nibbled away at by unnecessarily high transaction rates. You could be hindered by unresponsive and/or unhelpful tech support. With all these things in mind, you have to ask yourself something: Is the very thing that’s supposed to be helping your practice take in money actually eating away at its profitability? What is it really costing you?

In this blog, we are going to take a look at some of the ways that the wrong payments solution could be costing your practice more than you think.

The Cost of Bad Hardware

When it comes to payments solutions, hardware is sometimes one of those things that gets neglected. However, it is extremely important. If your provider is giving you slow or obsolete hardware, your practice will be restricted by wired terminals that take too long and offer little value outside of their ability to process a payment. As you probably know all too well, these card terminals aren’t free and can cost as much as $500 a piece. For that price, you should be getting what you pay for with wireless terminals that can be taken anywhere in the office and have modern capabilities such as tap-to-pay. Anything less and you are paying too much.

Outdated card terminals can also affect your practice’s brand image. Your practice could have a beautiful, modern look that impresses patients the moment they walk in the door. However, what happen when they go to check out and see a bulky, ugly, wired terminal that looks like it came from the year 1985? What happens when they want to use a tap-to-pay function and your terminal doesn’t have that capability? Well, what happens is that the patient leaves the experience with the impression that your practice is behind the times.

Needless to say, outdated hardware is not a good look, and it could even lead younger patients to choose to go elsewhere. Tech and digital experiences matter a lot to millennials and Gen Z. In fact, one survey of 1,600 younger Americans (age 18-24) found that 41 percent of them said they would consider switching to a different healthcare provider who offered a better digital experience if they were dissatisfied with that of their current one.

The Cost of Limited Mobility

This ties back to hardware as well as how the solution is integrated (if it is integrated at all) with your EHR and Practice Management system. Does your payments solution integrate with your EHR/PM system so that it allows your team to do everything in one place without duplicate data entry or restricted mobility?

For example, think about when you are on the phone with a patient who wants to schedule an appointment. Are you able to create a payment profile quickly and easily for that patient, making it possible to securely store his/her credit card information? If not, you are not only wasting your practice’s time. You are wasting your patient’s time, as well. Because to make a payment at checkout, they have to pull out their card each and every time. Once again, it’s not a good look and can make your practice seem outdated.

High Transaction Rates That Nibble at Your Profits

Do you know what your vendor is charging your practice for each transaction you process? If not, you should definitely look into that as soon as possible. You may be paying more than you realize, or you may be paying high rates for mediocre service and support. You may be paying too much in rates when you are not receiving any value in return.

Transaction rates are one of those “death by nibbles” things. Those small amounts add up over time, and you should be getting value in return in the form of up-to-date hardware and top-notch support. Otherwise, what are these paying for other than just giving you the “privilege” of being able to process credit/debit cards?

The Cost (& Frustration) of Unresponsive Support

Tech support is one of those things that has more than just a monetary cost. “Time is money,” as the saying goes. Poor tech support can cost you far more than just money in terms of time and (perhaps just as importantly) frustration. When you don’t have the support you need, when you need it, you aren’t getting the value you deserve.

When your payments system goes down or you start experiencing issues, you need to get things back up and running as soon as possible. What you don’t need to do is to spend hours on hold (probably listening to the same hold music on a loop with a message that comes on every few minutes about how much they “appreciate your call”). You don’t need to be forced to go through an 800-number phone tree, pressing number after number before you manage to reach a real person. You don’t need to be dealing with an outsourced support team that isn’t properly trained and doesn’t really know how to help you.

Is Your Payments Provider Giving You Value for Your Money?

Any payments solution is going to cost money. However, it is important to be sure you are getting the highest value for those hard-earned dollars. With a fully-integrated solution like Nextech Payments, your practice will have the power of wireless, modern card terminals in addition to competitive rates and the backing of an award-winning, US-based support team that is ready and able to help you with any issues you might encounter.

To learn more about how Nextech can get your practice set up for financial success,  fill out this form and a member of our team will contact you soon!