Recent reports have said that around a third of credit card users have medical debt on their credit cards. Some 60% stated that a credit card was the only way they could pay. These pre-pandemic numbers have only risen in 2020 and will probably continue to surge. More people are paying for medical services with credit cards, which is why Crystal Clear Digital Marketing has made it a point to integrate P2PE billing security into its patient management (PM) software.
Not only is this feature highly sought after in the medical industry, but it also provides several benefits and protections for your business. You can simplify several of your medspa’s operations using P2PE billing security. Best of all, you’ll be safe from potential fines or hacks from malicious infiltrators. For a modern medspa, modern software is the only solution. Let’s look at how P2PE works and how it can help your medspa flourish.
Why You Need Integrated P2PE Billing Security for Your Medspa
What Is P2PE?
P2PE stands for point-to-point encryption. This is a standard method of protecting a customer’s payment information when they send payment over a network. The moment they swipe their card or click to pay on your website, their credit card information is immediately encrypted using a complex algorithm. This makes it impossible to read the data while it is in transit.
From there, the data travels over the internet to the payment processor. We have integrated payment processing into our software, so if you’re using Crystal Clear’s PM software, it will travel through our platform to the credit card network. Our system supports all major credit card providers, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and more.
The data is only decrypted when it reaches the final destination, where it is then read and used to complete the payment. We receive notice of the completed transaction and confirm this to the customer. Once confirmed, we update your payment logs and the client’s payment status automatically using our software.
Compliance Concerns
While this might seem technically complicated, it’s actually a very simple process that takes mere seconds. The P2PE standard was developed in 2011 and since then it has become the default for doing business online. If your medspa is using older software or POS equipment, you could be putting your clients’ payment information at risk. This creates serious concerns for compliance.
As a medspa, you are subject to several different regulations regarding your clients’ personal information. There is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, which protects medical data; the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council, which regulates how credit cards can be used; and in some cases, you may run into trouble with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or FCRA.
Crystal Clear has designed its software with each of these regulations in mind to ensure that you can operate with peace of mind and without any worry of running afoul of these various regulations. Here is how P2PE billing security protects you in each of these three situations.
HIPAA Compliance
HIPAA requires that any medical facility, including medspas that provide certain treatments or procedures, protect patients’ protected health information (PHI) whenever it could be considered “individually identifiable”. Payment information qualifies since it includes not only a credit card number (which is unique to the person) but also their billing address and name.
If you are not using the P2PE standard, then patients who pay through your website or at your medspa could possibly have their payment information stolen on its way to the processor. Furthermore, you should never keep plain text records of patients’ payment information. This is an outdated practice that some older medspa managers do out of habit.
HIPAA applies to both electronic PHI and paper records. It’s always better to use electronic records through secure software to ensure that nobody can access this data without permission. If you suffer a data breach, and your patients’ payment information is leaked, you can face fines of anywhere from $100 to $50,000 per record lost. The exact amount will depend on the severity, the level of negligence involved, and the number of records lost.
PCI Compliance
The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council is a union of several banking and payment processing giants. They have agreed to ensure that companies who use their payment systems adhere to the latest standards. This makes sense, since if someone steals a person’s credit card information, it’s ultimately the card issuer and bank who foot the bill for fraudulent activity.
The PCI’s rules apply to all businesses who use credit cards for payment, not just medical service providers. As the PCI is not a government agency, you can be on the hook for HIPAA violations and PCI violations at the same time.
If your payment system is non-compliant and someone is able to steal a patient’s data from your medspa, you could face significant fines from the card issuer or bank themselves. For instance, if Visa were to find you non-compliant, you would pay $10,000 a month for the first three months of noncompliance. Is your medspa compliant with the PCI standard?
FCRA Compliance
The FCRA is a law that specifically targets “consumer reporting agencies” (CRAs), which are businesses that aggregate data on consumers and provide reports to other companies. Perhaps the most well-known are the credit bureaus like Equifax. While the FCRA does not apply to medspas or other medical facilities directly, it could matter if you provided them with erroneous information.
Medical facilities regularly have to report information to CRAs, for instance when a patient has an overdue bill. You may also need to provide medical information on a patient, depending on the type of procedures you offer. The Federal Trade Commission has a special set of rules for “furnishers” that give information to CRAs.
If your clients’ payment information is not protected, or your system is not accurately tracking information regarding client payments, you could find yourself submitting false information to a CRA and possibly damaging your patients’ credit reports. The FTC imposes a fine of $4,063 for each violation that occurs. It’s easy to see how bad data management could begin to get very costly.
The Danger of Data Breaches
Compliance with the aforementioned regulations is especially important nowadays, as data breaches are on the rise. COVID-19 sparked a sharp increase in data breaches against medical facilities. In fact, the healthcare industry is now the top target for hackers and these breaches are some of the most expensive to resolve due to the sensitivity of the information. Unfortunately, many doctors are not well versed in cybersecurity and easily fall victim to these attacks.
P2PE billing security helps to prevent data breaches by making it impossible to steal credit card information in transit. It also limits the potential damage of a data breach in the event you do have once. Since you won’t be holding on to your clients’ sensitive payment information, this data won’t get stolen during a breach and your liabilities will be reduced.
Using Crystal Clear’s PM software, not only can you protect your clients’ payment information, but you can also protect the rest of their sensitive medical data. In addition, our billing suite makes it easy to perform a number of other tasks. What other benefits can your medspa gain by using industry-leading software?
Medical Spa Software Solutions
Our medical spa software comes equipped with several different features that make billing easy for your business. Not only can you manage payments through the platform, but you can gain valuable insights from your customers’ spending patterns and simplify your billing procedures. You can even automate several tasks and save your staff time and ultimately, save money.
Track Patient Spending
When you have P2PE billing security integrated into a smart platform like ours, you’re able to do so much more with your data. One of the best features is the ability to track an individual patient’s spending and get reports on their activity. You can use this information in a variety of ways to improve customer retention and drum up repeat business.
For instance, you could note when a long-term client tends to drop by and schedule automated emails with special promotional offers catered specifically to their purchases. You can’t do that with traditional billing methods.
The spending data from all of your clients is gathered up and fed into our billing module so that you can output financial reports and easily see which of your services is selling the best, and which ones need a little help. You can use this information to schedule sales during the slow months, and prioritize your VIP clients during those busy days.
Membership Packages
Membership packages are a fantastic way to retain clients and keep them coming back for more. When you have P2PE, you don’t have to worry about keeping a patient’s payment information on file. The system takes care of that with encryption and keeps their data safe.
Now your clients can pay monthly after entering their credit card information a single time. You can customize the memberships to your liking, even making special packages for individual clients.
Automate Billing and Collections
Your reception staff has more important things to do than to mail out bills and send payment reminders. Our software can do all of that for you and more. Once you configure the cost of all of your products and services, the system will automatically bill your patient and update the patient’s profile in the system.
Integrating payment and billing into one system means that you don’t have to work with multiple companies. Instead of dealing with a payment processor and a billing company, you get everything you need under one roof.
Gift Cards
Our system even has integrated gift card functionality, so you can reward your customers with a gift card for repeat business, let them buy cards as gifts for others, and accept the cards as payment later on. You can mix and match payment types with ease and, again, avoid dealing with yet another company.
Telehealth Billing
During these complicated times, more and more people are turning to telehealth. Our software has a robust suite of telehealth options to enable consultations and follow-up appointments online, in full compliance with the law. And since you need a way to accept payment online, P2PE billing security can help your medspa go completely virtual.
Schedule a Demo Today
If you would like to try out our Social Patient Center, just call Crystal Clear Digital Marketing today to schedule an online consultation. We can show you how the system works and help you set it up in your medspa. It includes a host of other useful features that will make your business compliant with regulations and ready for whatever comes next.
