A few years ago, I met the manager of a medical billing office. Her interest in my business was benign at first. She was “set” with a national bank doing her credit card processing. All she wanted to make sure was that her clients received their money…they were already taking a cut on their fees because of her services; she didn’t want them to wait any longer than necessary to get paid. Her big bank worked for her.

Then, after sitting across from her a networking event, a few key words in my “commercial” for what I do peeked her interest:

Security
Unique employee log-ins
Processing terminal
Extra phone lines
Payment plans
Evaluate cost vs. rate

Then, one morning, she reached out to me and asked me if I had a few minutes to talk about her office. She had some concerns about security and her credit card processing terminal.

Turns out, her growing medical practice was literally growing faster than she could keep up with it. With the Affordable Care Act changing the industry, she needed to move fast. At the time, she only had one terminal on the first floor of her office, but now, about half of her account reps were on the second floor. When a customer decided to just pay the amount due in full, they had to write down the card number, run downstairs and wait for the time it took to process the card – all while the customer was on hold!

I know, nothing like this ever happens to you, does it?

More importantly, YES, I did stop her from doing a few things that were risky and insecure! Never, ever write down a credit card number to process it!

She knew It was inefficient, time consuming and there were several points of PCI compliance she thought might be a problem, but adding another terminal meant additional cost and possibly another phone line. She wanted to see if I could help.

We decided not to add another terminal, thus saving her the added expenses of not just the terminal, the additional phone line, too. She was actually able to convert the other line into an incoming phone number so she could help more of her client’s customers pay their fees. We created unique log-ins for each of her staff members, which could be monitored for security and even better, turned off if someone left. Customers could pay in moments rather than in minutes and her overall costs dropped with our services.

Now, each year, we review her account, make sure that she has the right services on her account, and I look for ways to help her save even more, so that she can be efficient and charge her clients less – keeping them with her medical billing practice, year over year.

~ Mary Ann