Improve Credit Card Processing Rates For Medical Industries

Medical facilities often pay high credit card processing rates for an industry that has a lower volume of purchases. The unfortunate result is a major impact on profits. The credit card processing rates for other industries make more sense when there are many high-value transactions that happen at a quicker pace; however, this isn’t the same in the healthcare industry. Additionally, a lot of the transactions are not dependent upon having a card present. In the medical field, card information can be kept on file, which lessens the amount of cards that are swiped versus key entered.  Because of these differences, credit card processing fees may be drastically reduced with the right steps. 

Contact the team at Interchange Pros today to get the support you need to lower your credit card processing rates for your medical business.

How to Lower Credit Card Processing Fees

You are most likely paying far more than you should as a medical facility. The average overhead cost of a physician’s practice is anywhere between 60% to 70%. Credit card fees should be the smallest fraction of this amount. When you work with a credit card processing company you can negotiate lower processing fees by reducing security risk. There are a few practices you can incorporate into your business to help with this. 

 
Low-Risk Healthcare Practices 

Adding more low-risk healthcare practices to your financial system will encourage credit card companies to lower the processing fees. With higher security measures in place, you make it easier for credit card companies to avoid fraudulent activity. Low-risk practices prevent a large number of chargebacks. The credit card company will recognize this business practice and will be less likely to mark up rates when there is very little risk involved.

Switch to In-Office Instead of Mailed Billing

To help improve payment systems processing, you can migrate billing to in-office credit card processing. This helps to lower the complications that come with non-paying patients who may miss paying on their mailed invoices every so often. Additionally, in-office billing often helps to improve revenue cycles. 

Create Programs That Improve Patient Relationships

When you improve your relationship with your patients it helps them to pay on time. You can provide a wider range of payment options to strengthen your relationship with them as it allows them great flexibility. For patients with low income, you can offer provisions that help them to pay on-time despite their financial insecurity. Creating unique programs for their needs will aid them in this cause. Another approach is to encourage patients to keep their card-on-file so that ongoing care continues to receive payments. This helps to cover any payments that aren’t covered by insurance.

Spending Less Time on Payment Issues

Reduce the amount of time your staff spends on payment issues. Streamlining your payment processing and reducing the amount of work your staff will help to cut costs. In addition to in-house payments and keeping cards on file, you can request payments be made virtually. A virtual terminal improves flexibility as well as the ability to take some of the work off of your staff’s hands. Additionally, there is less room for error as payments are processed through software and not manually. There is also far better security with online processing.

Negotiate Lower Fees

When working with a credit card company you can request low transaction fees and argue the fact that you have more low-dollar transactions and small copays. This is quite different from other industries that have more high-dollar transactions. It would be unfair to pay a high fee for smaller transactions, where all revenue is lost because of high percentage costs. Credit card processing companies may consider this. Additionally, while in the medical field there is a low volume of transactions. In other industries, you may see fees that are charged according to the thousands of transactions that happen every day. With this in mind, you can propose a fee that is fairer for the daily volume of transactions you expect.

Introduce Automated Billing

You can try to introduce automated billing with some of your payment programs and other flexible options. With automated billing, you have less to worry about when considering the number of payments that might be missed with patients who don’t pay on time. This will reduce the amount of fraud that occurs and also brings peace of mind. With this option in place, the credit card processing company will trust your transactions will be less of a hassle because you took the opportunity to put more security measures in place for a more stable in-flow of transactions. This can also work to help reduce processing fees. 

Learn How to Reduce Your Credit Card Fees

Don’t get caught paying far too much for your transactions. You can learn how to keep your credit card processing fees to a minimum in your medical practice. Contact Interchange Pros today.