We often hear from Private Practice owners regarding the ability to store a credit card on file for future patient responsibility. While you and your patients are familiar with having your credit card data stored with merchants that you frequent, or that require it, there is still trepidation over storing the card data within your Private Practice.
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We entrust everyone from Google, Amazon, Uber, Netflix, Utility Companies and more with your sensitive card information every day. With so much concern over data breaches, we still continue to trust these entities with our card data. Why? Because at the end, it makes our lives easier.
This concept should be no different within the medical community. Everyone knows that a final balance will be due well after the final visit, or there are recurring transactions for therapy over time, so a secure method to securely store credit card information will enable your practice to collect higher percentages in a shorter timeline. In fact, a clear financial policy has also proven to increase patient satisfaction.
Storing payment information in a locked safe or on a file in your computer, not only a violation of the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry – Data Security Systems), but puts your practice at high risk of a payment card breach.Every year, medical providers, Hospitals, retailers, etc announce that their systems have been breached and customer payment information stolen.
In March of 2016,21st Century Oncology, announced that its systems had been breached and medical records of over 2.2 million people had been compromised. As a result, 21st Century has been forced to allocate resources to managing not only the fix, but also the outreach to affected customers, and the cost of private credit monitoring services for each individual. The costs for 21st Century Oncology go far beyond loss of business reputation.
Worst case scenarios tend to dominate the media. In fact, most businesses are never a victim of a data security breach. By understanding and employing “Best Practices” around handling sensitive information, like credit card data, most practices avoid “headline making” data breaches.
Many systems exist for Medical Providers to easily and securely store credit card data. As outlined by PCI-DSS a system that uses Point to Point Encryption(P2PE) + “Tokenization” will significantly increase the security of your payments, making them virtually untouchable. In fact, employing this level of security will actually remove your practice from the Scope of PCI compliance.
In a medical practice, this means the card data is encrypted at the device (Mag-swipe, Chip Reader, KeyPad), sent for authorization, then converted into a “Token” which the practice can reference for any future payment. The PCI-DSS publishes a list of all payment platforms that are enabled with Point to Point Encryption P2PE.
When speaking with your payment processor, ask them if they are familiar with P2PE and if they have any solutions that offer these features. If not, they are neglecting fact based research that shows that merchants with a P2PE solution have fewer card data breaches than those that don’t.
Learn more about the most secure medical payments platform available today!
At Go CardConnect, we offer secure payment solutions that meet the highest industry standards. We work with third party software vendors to integrate our payment technology, and we work with individual merchants and practices as well. Our “Stand-Alone” Payment Solution for the medical space has proven to decrease costs, improve processes and increase collections. Contact Go CardConnect today for further details on how we can help your business.