Development of the Payment Management System for Medical Practice

As a business owner, you constantly make decisions on how to automate some of your operations. Especially it concerns moving from manual to digital processes.

Check this out: maybe you still keep track of financial transactions using spreadsheets or send invoices via mail. It might seem that everything works as it should but in reality, it slows down business performance and costs your company additional expenses.

In fact, customer payment preferences have changed dramatically.

These days, businesses have to offer their customers multiple ways to pay for services. It’s no longer an option but a necessity.

At the end of the day, your business will end up integrating a payment processor to optimize accounting operations and making billing as smooth as possible for both you and your paying customers.

Continue reading this case study to learn how the CXDojo team helped our client, a medical software provider, run operations more efficiently through payment processor integration.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The client provides software solutions to private medical practices and institutions to keep the patient’s records and facilitate communication between patients and healthcare professionals.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

After a patient visit, the medical practice had to use third-party services to issue invoices and accept payments, which significantly complicated the bill-paying process.

Our client conducted customer research and identified the need to develop an internal billing system to streamline the financial activities involved in medical practices. In other words, there was a need for automated billing and accounting processes with the possibility to provide a convenient and secure way for practices to issue invoices as well as keep track of the accounts receivable and billing. On the other hand, patients should be able to pay for office visits, lab tests, and treatments.

For this reason, our client decided to develop a single, comprehensive patient payment solution to provide consistency across the entire organization.

Our challenge was to develop a billing system that ensures efficient charge creation and timely payments for our clients with integration to clinical systems.

In addition, we were also responsible for:

• Designing the software architecture model of the billing system.
• Ensuring system reliability.
• Implementing integration with Splash Payments.

The process included architecture development, payment processing integration, testing, and more.

SOLUTION

The project required developing a solution that would integrate our client’s healthcare platform with a payment processor. To design the system, we conducted a series of workshops that included the following activities:

• An audit of the client’s system, focusing on architecture and security issues.
• Identifying system architecture improvements to increase reliability and expand flexibility.
• A feasibility study of the integration process.
• Planning the best way to integrate the processor (architecture vision and system functional requirements issues).
• Identifying all possible limitations and risks.

The client wanted to bill patients and accept payments by integrating Splash Payments, a payment processor that allows merchants of the online marketplace to capture customer information and process payments without the need to store sensitive customer details into their servers.

Splash Payments is a reliable solution for platform owners who are looking to supply their merchants with a single-source payment processor and gateway.

For starters, we designed the architecture of the payment management system and integrated it with Splash Payments.

The system included two types of clients:
– practices as merchants;
– and their patients as clients to a payment processing service.

Each medical practice was able to create its own account and accept payment with the help of Splash Payments. For merchants to get paid, ubiquitous credit cards as well as industry-specific eChecks, or electronic checks were used.

In a nutshell, eCheck is a form of online payment where the money is electronically withdrawn from the payers’ checking account (in our case patients), transferred over the ACH network, and deposited into the payee’s (medical practice) account. Using the ACH merchant account, the medical practice can now withdraw payments for service directly from the patient’s bank account. In addition to that, as our platform is HIPAA compliant, we shouldn’t have to transfer any sensitive data to Splash.

All in all, the medical practices got a convenient system where all information about invoices payment statuses, and patient transactions was stored. All possible statuses, including pending, in progress (in case payment by installments), canceled, rejected can be handled by the implemented system. When developing the new feature, we encountered cases of error messages from the processing system and errors in code and payment statuses, such as insufficient funds, authentication failures, and cases when the bank wasn’t able or didn’t want to process the transaction, etc.

We developed multiple use cases to handle each customer complaint and issue. We had to constantly pull up information from Splash and process it so that patients had updated information on the status of their payments.

The results were immediate. In less than a month, our client was using a comprehensive, integrated payment system to process credit cards and eCheck billing, and confirm patient payments.

The CXDojo team managed to simplify the way the client’s platform works by enabling processing dozens of transactions each day and increasing cash flow.

VALUE DELIVERED

📌 A fully developed solution where the client’s payment system was integrated with the paying processor.

📌 The system got its marketplace.

📌 Higher patients satisfaction and convenience.

📌 Automated recurring billing cycles to reduce missed payments.

📌 All issues related to the processing of payments were mitigated.

📌 The system works reliably with a low bounce rate.

📌 The system supports the following payment features: issue invoices, gather online payments, view records of medical payment amounts, dates, and status in one place, securely hold a credit card or bank information for repeat payments.

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