How PayTo benefits healthcare providers and their patients

As a healthcare provider, your top priority is delivering high-quality care and services to your patients. Unfortunately, managing payments and invoices can be a time-consuming and tedious process. This can result in administrative tasks becoming a burden and a distraction from the work you love.

Introducing: PayTo. Developed by the New Payments Platform (NPP), PayTo enables you to collect payments in real-time from your patients' bank accounts. 

It offers all the benefits of direct debit but with added speed, simplicity, and security. With pre-authorised payment agreements, PayTo can help reduce payment disputes, missed payments, and fraud risks.

Now, let's explore how PayTo can benefit medical and allied health practices.

Payment methods in medical practices: consults vs. procedures 

Medical practices rely on convenient and reliable payment methods to offer consults (such as psychology or psychiatry) or procedures (i.e. surgery). 

The most common payment methods used include:

• In-person eftpos payments

• Online payments

• Direct deposit

Although these are common payment methods used by medical practices, they have their limitations.

When medical practices provide patients with a letter containing their BSB and account number for direct deposit payments, it may not always be the most ideal patient experience. Patients may misplace the letter or find it inconvenient to manually enter the details for payment.

Some practices offer over-the-phone payments, where patients may feel uncomfortable providing their credit card details over the phone.

With PayTo, practices can include a QR code in their email or letter, which links to a payment page. Patients enter their BSB and account details and then authorise the payment agreement via their banking app.

Check out the video below to see how quickly a PayTo agreement can be created and authorised. 

 

PayTo enables practices to:

Reduce their administrative costs & boost efficiency

Processing payments, sending invoices, and managing accounts can be a time-consuming and tedious process, taking away valuable time and resources from patient care.

 

Not to mention administrative costs associated with traditional payment methods can quickly add up, especially for medical practices and other healthcare providers. 

 

With PayTo, you can reduce administrative costs and free up resources that can be used to improve patient care and services. Easily track the status of payment agreements and stay informed about your patients' payment progress at any given time. Experience effortless reconciliation through a comprehensive settlement report that covers all enabled payment methods, such as PayTo (real-time), direct debit, eftpos, BPAY, online, and phone payments.

 

• Takeaway: This means less time and money spent on managing payments and more time spent on building patient retention and growing your business. 

Improve the patient experience with more ways to pay

A positive patient experience is essential for any medical or healthcare practice, and this includes the payment process. With PayTo, patients can make payments directly from their bank accounts, without the need for a credit card or other payment method. 

 

This can be useful for patients who may not have a credit card or prefer not to use one for their consultations or medical bills. 

 

Patients can set up a PayTo agreement with your practice for one-off consultations or to pay for ongoing treatments. 

 

For recurring appointments, you have the convenience of setting up an ongoing payment agreement with your patients. Once the patient securely enters their account details for the initial setup, their information is safely stored for future use. After each appointment, patients can leave knowing that their payment is taken care of while receiving a prompt email confirmation and receipt for their records.

 

• Takeaway: A seamless payment process significantly improves the patient experience and helps to avoid awkward money conversations.

Initiate & receive payments faster

With PayTo's real-time funds verification, your business can verify account balances—reducing friction in taking payments from patients. You can opt to have your funds for appointments, and treatments settled in your account on the same business day, removing the limitations of waiting days for traditional payment methods to clear.

• Takeaway: This helps improve cash flow and reduces the need for chasing payments, freeing up resources that can be used to focus on patient care and services.

Enhanced security

When it comes to payments, security is essential. PayTo uses advanced security measures, including two-factor authentication through the patient’s existing banking application, to keep transactions safe and secure. 

 

With centrally stored digital payment agreements, you don’t have the burden of maintaining records for seven years to meet compliance obligations. Plus, as payment agreements are pre-authorised by your patients, the risk of fraud and disputes is significantly reduced.

 

• Takeaway: This provides peace of mind for healthcare providers and their patients when making payments and reduces the chance of dishonours and disputes due to fraud or administrative errors.

Seamless integration

With a state-of-the-art API, PayTo has been redesigned with best practice functionality and usability as top priorities.

 

This means PayTo can be seamlessly integrated into your existing practice management software, keeping operations simple and streamlined for your admin team.

 

• Takeaway: You’ll spend less time on training and more time on delivering high-quality care to your patients.

 

Get your business PayTo ready

By using PayTo, you can improve cash flow, reduce administrative costs, increase efficiency, enhance the patient experience, and ensure secure payments. This means more time and resources can be devoted to delivering high-quality patient care.

 

If you’d like your business to be one of the first to trial PayTo, you can sign up for our pilot program. From there, the pilot team will reach out to you to provide the integration specifications and set up a meeting to discuss the next steps.