Payment Possibilities: Healthcare Providers and the Chip-and-PIN Transaction

Security, reliability, and flexibility: that’s what today’s healthcare consumers have come to expect when making a payment for medical services. And it’s why more healthcare providers have been meeting their patients’ point of sale (POS) payment needs with security-enhanced chip-and-PIN EMV technology. Let’s take a closer look at how—and why—more healthcare practices are investing in EMV-enabled payment applications and the hardware to support them.

The U.S. migration to EMV chip technology has accelerated quickly since the liability shift in the fall of 2015. More than 70% of consumers have at least one EMV chip card in their wallets, says CreditCards.com, and most major retailers have upgraded their POS systems to include smart card readers that can accept EMV-compliant chip cards. (Learn more in U.S. Retailers One Month Away from EMV Liability Shift and US EMV Five Months Later.) That means people are likely to want to use a chip-and-PIN card when making a payment at their healthcare provider. And it’s just in time, perhaps, to combat fraud in the U.S. healthcare system.

Fighting Fraud in Healthcare with POS Tech

The move toward accepting EMV payments can help providers address the healthcare industry’s massive $68 billion-a-year fraud problem by improving both patient identity authentication and patient and record mismatching. Chip-and-PIN technology, thanks to superior encryption and tokenization, offers better protection than traditional magnetic stripe cards in the event that a patient tried to use a stolen credit card to pay for medical services.

According to EMV 101 for the Healthcare Industry, a white paper from the Health & Human Services Council and the Smart Card Alliance, the areas most impacted by EMV chip card acceptance and that are of particular importance to hospital systems and providers including physicians, dentists, orthodontists, and others, are:

• Consumer/patient receivables – not only are more patients using cards to pay for medical services, but their transaction amounts are rising, which increases the potential for fraudulent loss.

• Consumer/patient experience – today’s patients are healthcare “shoppers” with service expectations driven by their experiences as retail consumers; providers, therefore, want to maintain a high-level of competitive service.

• Financial data security – it’s simply a top-of-mind concern for all parties in the healthcare system and a POS payment must-have.

Practical Applications of EMV Technology at the Healthcare POS

Chip-and-PIN technology, on its own, may not provide the best “answer” to solving the industry’s fraud problems—or deliver the utmost security demanded by patients. An added layer of healthcare identity authentication by way of a smart health card can significantly reduce the incidence of fraud in the healthcare system. These cards, as described by the Smart Card Alliance, support a wide variety of applications that improve the security and privacy of patient information (e.g. medical records, emergency medical information), reduce healthcare fraud, and enable compliance with government initiatives and mandates.

The potential to combine the technologies for optimum fraud-prevention is explored in the PaymentsSource article, EMV Can Also Benefit Health Care Payments. The author proposes different scenarios for the convergence of the technologies: two chip cards and one multi-application POS terminal, one multi-application chip card and one multi-application POS terminal, or one chip card with “special” payment application that supports EMV chip payment and allows non-payment data to be stored on the card.

The technologies are still relatively new and in the process of widespread adoption. But whatever “best practice” emerges for the use of EMV and/or smart health card technology at the provider’s POS is sure to result in more secure payment transactions that are also reliable and flexible. In other words, just what the patient ordered.