INC Now Offers Online Payment
Online Payment is Here! Over a year ago we decided to add online payment. I looked into a number of options, but nothing fit our long-term needs like the integrated payment system we ultimately settled on. There were a number of steps involved in the process, the largest of which was to switch to billing through ChARM which was best done on January 1st to keep our books straight and the IRS happy. So, here we are, fifteen months later finally offering a way to pay without writing out a check or calling in payment.
The History of Plastic: For those of you under, say 40, there was a time when cash and check were your only options for paying bills, and we simply accepted that everything took longer. In the eighties, credit cards existed but were mostly used for shopping at the mall, eating at Ponderosa, and ordering 8-tracks of the Bee Gees using the 800 number on your screen. However, none of these required a credit card, you didn’t even need plastic for mail orders; you could always pay by COD when your package arrived 6-8 weeks later. Charge cards were used extensively at the time; Dayton’s was known to grant them to kids as young as sixteen, but the only other form of plastic was the ATM card; a card only good for getting cash out of the issuing bank’s machine. Paying for groceries with plastic was unheard of. It would be the equivalent of Coborn’s accepting bitcoin today. The funny thing about the use of plastic by today’s standards is that you still had to write out checks as that was the only way to pay the bill when it arrived by mail each month. For those of you with a little more advanced life experience, this will give you an idea of how far we’ve come with regards to the use of checks: My nearly 21 year old daughter has had a checking account for five years. She has used one check. Her employer needed it to set up automatic deposit. So here we are, charge cards and ATM cards have been replaced by credit cards and the real gamechanger--debit cards--creating nearly instantaneous and universally accepted ways to pay with plastic. While we are not exactly cutting edge in offering online payment, it’s actually a pretty new thing in healthcare due to the security and integration necessary with HIPAA compliant software. Can you still mail us a check? Of course, just have your pterodactyl deliver it to our PO Box.
How to pay online: Use the pay button embedded in every emailed bill or log into your ChARM account and go to the “billing” icon. You should receive new bills 1-4 days after I create them, meaning you may pick a supplement up from the office but not receive the emailed invoice for several days. One thing you can’t do is make a partial payment. For that, you’ll need to send one of us a message or call Jaclyn at 218.237.2312 to pay over the phone. If you had a card on file in our old system, just let us know that you’d like to use it & I can migrate it over to the new system. And finally, we no longer have a way to track those patients who want us to run their card automatically. If you are in this category, please shoot us a quick message to run your card when you receive the bill.
Sincerely,
Chris Oppitz
Clinic Admin
TL;DR: You can now pay online, debit cards killed checks, and COD was possibly the weirdest way ever devised by humans to pay for stuff.
P.S. Check out the latest blog here.
