Practices have a lot on their plate when it comes to providing patients with the best customer experience. Time spent on navigating payment processing can take up valuable time that could be spent on building relationships and getting patients the care they need. This post will discuss what integrated payments are, and how they benefit your practice and your patients.

What are Integrated Payments?

Integrated payments refer to the payment processing systems like OpenEdge (a Division of Global Payments Integrated) that are embedded within the Open Dental software application. This allows you to accept payments within Open Dental, rather than processing the payment outside the software and entering the data manually. The way it works is simple: you enter the patient’s credit card information directly into Open Dental, the integrated payment service processes the payment and automatically records the payment information. Not only does this create a seamless patient experience, but it can also alleviate many administrative burdens your practice faces on a daily basis.

Why Should You Care about Integrated Payments?

1. A True Understanding of Your Practice

It’s important that your payment processor has expertise in the dental industry. If you ever have issues, you’ll be working with customer support that understands the practice management software, making problem resolution easier.

2. Payment Security You Can Count On

Data security is a huge threat in today’s digital age. The cost of providing truly secure, feature-rich, fast and reliable payment processing solutions backed by responsive support is nearly priceless. Although we never stop looking for ways to do what we do more economically, we won’t settle for less than the best possible security, reliability, and support.

How is this type of security ensured? Tokenization, encryption, and EMV are tools that ensure sensitive data elements are substituted with non-sensitive equivalents that have no exploitable value. These elements are important parts of an overall security solution that protects your patients as well as your practice.

3. A Seamless Patient Experience

OpenEdge allows your patients the convenience of payments online through the Open Dental Patient Portal. They can view appointments, send secure messages, and make payments, all in one location.

Your practice can also offer repeat and recurring payments to your customers to help reduce patient balances. Keep your patient transactions running successfully with Decline Minimizer, an OpenEdge feature provided at no additional cost. Decline Minimizer automatically updates expired, lost, and stolen credit cards that are stored on file in the data vault, eliminating the expensive, time-consuming task of tracking down outdated card information.

4. A Shared Desire to Keep You Happy

A practice using our payment solution is not only our client but a client of our partner – Open Dental – as well. Neither provider wants to jeopardize a successful and productive partnership by providing poor service to their client. Open Dental regularly reviews support metrics related to their merchant customers to ensure they’re receiving the level of service we both know you deserve.

If you’d like to learn more about integrated payments and why Open Dental users are choosing OpenEdge, click here.