Seeing Clearly: How Integrated Payments Strengthen Your Practice

Every eye care professional knows that healthy vision depends on actions like a well-balanced diet, regular exercise, and resting of the eyes. Eye health isn’t just about individual actions—it requires the synergy of multiple factors. Like our eyes, optometry practices also require synergy. Staff, practice technology, inventory, diagnostic equipment, communications/marketing, billing, and more need to function in unison to build a profitable practice. 

One of the most important components of a profitable practice is revenue management. While payments have traditionally been viewed as a single transaction at checkout, today's most efficient practices recognize that revenue flows throughout the entire patient journey—from payment collection and posting to reconciliation and reporting. Revenue management is no longer just about getting paid; it's about ensuring every step of the process works together efficiently within your practice management system.

For practices using Eyefinity Encompass^®, EncompassPay is the integrated payments solution purpose-built to support and streamline everyday workflows. By connecting payment processing directly within Encompass, transactions are automatically recorded in the patient ledger, reducing manual tasks, minimizing errors, and helping staff spend less time managing payments and more time focusing on patients.

The result is a more connected, efficient approach to revenue management—one that helps practices reduce administrative burden, improve accuracy, and simplify day-to-day operations.

What is an Integrated Payments Solution?   

An integrated payment solution integrates payment processing with your practice management software, creating a single connected workflow that streamlines payment collection, posting, reconciliation, and reporting. This saves time spent on tasks like data entry, payment authorizations, reconciliations, and more. Equally important, it provides access to the technology a business needs to evolve their operations over time. By optimizing your workflows and adapting to match the demands of an ever-changing marketplace, an integrated payments solution provides you with an invaluable tool to set your practice up for success.

Benefit #1: Streamline Operations

When payments operate outside the practice management system, staff are forced to bridge the gap manually. That often means exporting reports, rekeying data, and troubleshooting across vendors. Over time, this creates frustration, errors, and loss of confidence in the numbers.

One of the biggest advantages of having an integrated solution is that it automates payment processes, allowing practices to bypass having to enter and reconcile transaction data, which is time-consuming and prone to error. Payments are automatically posted at the time of sale, and the ledger will display the transaction history, making accounting easier, more accurate, and providing immediate access to transaction data and insights.

Benefit #2: Improve the Customer Experience

Customers now expect a cutting-edge checkout experience. In fact, nearly 9 out of every 10 Americans is using some form of digital payments. An integrated payments solution expedites checkouts for patients and staff with convenient payment methods like EMV (chip credit cards), contactless tap-to-pay, and digital wallets. It also offers line-busting options such as self-checkout, online checkout, and mobile checkout for payment acceptance throughout a practice’s location. This helps practices grow with their customers’ needs.

An integrated payments solution simplifies checkouts for both staff and patients. Payments are posted correctly the first time, and new staff can be trained more quickly because they’re working in one familiar system. Instead of scrambling to make systems line up, staff can focus on delivering a positive customer experience. 

Benefit #3: Customize Your Solution for Your Practice

Just like our irises are unique to our eyes, every business has needs specific to their operations. When transactional data is connected to your practice management system, you gain a clearer view of the trends shaping your business. For example, when connected to a CRM system, the two systems can work together to provide insights on customer purchasing trends or be designed to track inventory, sales, and deliveries. A practice can tailor their integrated payments solution to provide the information they want—so they can improve on any area of their operations from marketing to accounting and customer service.

Taking the Next Step 

How do you find the right integrated payments solution for your practice? Look closely at how revenue flows through your practice today. Identify where manual steps and disconnected systems exist and consider how integrating revenue inside your practice management could simplify operations and support growth. 

As mentioned previously, EncompassPay was built specifically for Eyefinity Encompass. Transactions automatically record in the patient ledger, eliminating double data entry, reducing reconciliation errors, and cutting end-of-day processing time. Plus, you can skip the confusion of complex statements and surprise fees with a transparent, fixed-rate, fee structure—only 2.7% + $0.10 per transaction. You won’t be tied down to a contract and can cancel at any time.  

Getting started with EncompassPay is easy—and risk-free. Plus, for a limited time, you’ll receive a FREE terminal when you sign up.

Learn More.

Don’t have Eyefinity Encompass? Now's the time to join the cloud. 

Sources:

McKinsey & Company

*Offer available between February 1, 2023 - July 31, 2024.