Offering patients plenty of ways to pay for healthcare services is one of the best ways to engage them, and you can maximize your patient payment collections at the same time. However, new online payment options can cause or increase security risks if your practice does not take the proper precautions. With data breaches threatening healthcare organizations, potentially causing serious financial and reputation-hurting repercussions, you must look for ways to protect sensitive payment information and improve your practice’s security when offering online payments.
Millions of security breaches make the internet very vulnerable for healthcare practices every year. Some of your patients are maybe aware, and some of them are not aware of this risk. As a rule, top-notch developers dealing with healthcare solutions like vitechteam.com provide the best possible secutrity level without any breaches in their developments. But If your practice’s website can’t provide the highest level of online payment security, your patients may look for another provider.
Avoid that from happening by following these five tips to enhance online payment security at your healthcare practice:
1. Ensure Data Encryption
An effective step towards strengthening online payment security is to use data encryption to keep your patient’s financial information secure. Open Wi-Fi networks are relatively easy for cybercriminals to hack, especially if the data is not encrypted. Data encryption ensures that your patient’s sensitive information is only viewed by authorized personnel and does not fall into the wrong hands. It also reduces the password-hacking probability to a great extent. All these features combined add an additional protection layer for patients during an online payment transaction.
Data encryption is critical as it affects more than financial transactions — most patient engagement relies on electronic communications. Practices of all sizes use emails and text messages, online appointment booking, electronic registration forms, and more to connect with their patients.
2. Secure Credit Card Data for Payment Plans and Automatic Payments
As more patients’ healthcare plans require them to pay for services, many healthcare providers have begun offering payment plans to collect significant balances and avoid late payments. To establish a proper payment plan, one of the most effective things you can do is save a patient’s credit card on file to charge in a series of installments. But, many providers do not save their patient’s online credit card information in a secure and compliant way. Not only are they risking their patient’s information, but they are also risking their practice’s reputation when they improperly store their patient’s card information in their system.
You can take advantage of technology in healthcare to store patient credit card information securely online. That significantly decreases the risk of cybercriminals stealing payment information. Additionally, you can automate the collection of bills since the payment method is already saved.
3. Keep Your Network Updated
Cybercriminals constantly find new ways to hack into systems, and while your network may be safe from them today, it may not be in the future. Because of that, your practice’s computer network must have security updates regularly installed. Automatic updates guarantee the installation of important protections, and not having them could put your online transaction security at risk.
4. Provide a Secure Login
This security measure is perhaps the most important step in the online payment process for healthcare practices. It is precariously easy for hackers to infiltrate your practice’s system and steal all login information if you do not have a secure system for the login process. In times when a patient forgets their password, they should have to enter a username or their email address to retrieve it by using the given link to change the password. This safety protocol is effective even if it may seem simple, as it saves you from many potential threats. What you can also do is use two-factor authentication for login.
5. Offer privacy guidance
If you offer online payment options to your patients, offer them information on how to protect their information and payment details. This could include password protection options such as password keychains or frequent changes. Give them tips on how to recognize phishing scams and other potential scams. Educating your patients about cybersecurity can help them feel confident and secure about using your online payment options.
By following these five tips, you keep online medical billing transactions secure and reduce the likelihood of a security breach.
Online Payments Through Curogram Offer a Seamless Transaction with a Secure Process.
Compliance and security risks requirements for online medical payments are an important part of your practice’s risk management strategy. With Curogram, you can make sure that your medical billing process goes smoothly and has the necessary protection to keep patient payment data secure. Contact Curogram to know more about secure online healthcare payments and how to strengthen your system from security breaches.