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At a Glance

The Athelas Charge Saved Cards tab gives you a powerful tool to use with any patient who has an outstanding balance and also has a saved credit card on file. From this interface you can:
  • Specify a list of patients for whom you want to charge their saved cards
  • Narrow that list by total amount due and types of balances due
  • Charge all of these credit cards at once With this feature at your disposal, unpaid balances can become a thing of the past.

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Best Practices

1. Communicate to your patients while they’re in office that you’re going to save their credit card and auto debit them once their bill comes due. Some practices even include this in their intake terms of service. Prepping patients ahead of time will prevent any confusion when the charges are made. 2. Aim to use this feature on a regular basis so that patient balances don’t build up too high. Even when patients opt in, if you charge them thousands of dollars when you haven’t spoken to them a while you’re going to get some confused phone calls. 3. Set the maximum allowable charge to an amount you don’t expect to surprise any patients. For very high charges it may be best to contact the patient before charging their saved credit card.

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Feature Walkthrough

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1. Filter Charge Types

By default all payment types are included in your collection list, but if there are some types of payments you don’t want to automatically charge, you can click into the ‘Line Items’ dropdown and uncheck them. These will automatically be omitted.

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2. Min and Max Balance Due

There are some balances that are too high to charge without advance notice, and some that are too small to be worthwhile. That’s why you have the ability to set a minimum and a maximum for the total patient balances you want included in this round of payments. Generally we recommend:
  • Minimum of $20 to reduce the impact of credit card fees.
  • Maximum of $500 — any more than that and it’s worth contacting the patient before charging them. You can always use a patient’s saved card to take a payment directly from their patient profile. Of course, you know your patients and their financial expectations best. If your patients expect thousands of dollars in charges, set the min and max to whatever you feel is appropriate.

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3. Select Patients

Now that you’ve narrowed down your list, you can make any final edits before you hit send. By default all patients who meet the criteria you’ve set will be opted-in and will appear in the Whitelist. You then have the option to select any of the whitelisted patients and Disable them to remove them from this batch of charges:
  • Check the box for any patients you want to opt-out
  • You can search the list of patients with a designated search bar
  • Click the ‘Disable Selected’ button and they’ll be moved to the Disabled group that won’t be charged in this batch.

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4. Confirm Charges

Once you’ve settled on your final list, you’re ready to initiate the batch of charges. Click the ‘Confirm’ button right below the Whitelisted/Disabled tables to initiate payment: Once you do, you’ll see a pop up window asking you to confirm that you have the patients’ authorization to charge their card on file. With that confirmed, the charges will commence immediately. If there’s a high volume of charges, the process may take several minutes to complete, but once it does you’ll find a record of the charges in the ‘History’ table at the bottom of the page.

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5 Patient Notifications / Receipts

Of course no transaction would be complete without informing the patient, so these charges are accompanied by both text message and email confirmations sent to the patient. Fair warning, you will likely get a few calls to your front desk the first time you use this tool, but that’s completely normal. Once patients get acclimated to automatic debiting this will become a standard and expected part of visiting your practice.

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❗Important Note

Currently this tool needs to be manually triggered by a member of your staff. Configuring the tool as described above will not result in automatic recurring charges.

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In Conclusion

When used consistently, the Charge Saved Cards tool can be one of the most powerful tools in your belt for collecting patient responsibility. Try to weave it into your weekly patterns of your practice and it will become a major revenue driver for you.