At a Glance

💡Virtual credit cards are digital credit cards that function like physical credit cards—but without the plastic. They will generally be sent to your practice by insurance companies as payment towards a patient’s outstanding balance.

Rather than providing the same card number to multiple vendors, companies can limit their exposure to potential fraud by generating different 16-digit card numbers and expiration dates for each transaction.

Do not use this feature as a means of collecting payment from patients if, for example, your card reader is down.

In situations like that, follow these steps:

• Charge the patient.

  • To do this, you can click Charge on the Appointments page, for example.

• Review the charges, then select Pay via Credit Card in the payment popup. Click Enter Card Information.

• Enter their credit card information manually.

Why Virtual Credit Cards?

It has been widely theorized that payers send virtual credit cards because practices are much less likely to be successful in extracting the funds than they would be if the payer sent a paper check.

Of course that’s no good — your practice deserves every dollar you’ve earned! This is why Athelas provides this tool designed specifically to extract 100% of funds from these virtual cards and send them to your bank account. Here’s how it works:

1. Find your virtual credit card, then navigate to the Process Virtual Card tab and click the ‘Process a Virtual Card’ button.

2. This opens a window where you can select the Payer and enter the Full Amount you want to extract from the card. For some practices you may also need to specify the associated Facility or Provider, which generally happens if your practice operates on multiple sets of financial books and/or Stripe accounts.

3. Then enter the credit card details as they’re listed in the documentation from the payer, just like you would for any normal online purchase:

4. Once you hit ‘Confirm Payment’ Athelas will use your Stripe account to create a payment for the full amount, draining the card entirely. Then two things will happen:

• A record of the transaction will be added to the page, so you can track which cards you’ve already handled and which still need to be processed.

• The revenue from this transaction will be added to your revenue metrics to create the most up to date picture of your billing performance.

And that’s it! A simple feature to help you fight back against the tricky practices of the payers that make it harder for your practice to get paid.

Best Practices

1. Try to process virtual cards on a weekly basis, the longer you let them sit the longer revenue will be missing from your bank account and your metrics

2. Often virtual cards come with EOBs attached to them. When this is the case please upload the EOB via the EOB Posting tool in Insights. Our reconciliation team will automatically process them for you.

3. Only use this tool for payer virtual cards! Do not use it for patient payments. If you need to collect a patient payment please do that via the Patient Responsibility tab or the Appointments tab. Using this tool for patient payments will make your revenue analytics inaccurate.

 View Virtual Card Transactions in a Report

From the My Reports page, select the Site Transaction Report download button. Use the filters to specify date range, facility, provider, etc., then click

Download

.All Virtual Card transactions that match your specifications will appear in the ‘Payment Type’ column of the

processed_transactions_...

CSV file, as shown below.