We've had an ongoing problem with virtual credit cards coming from Instamed. As I understand it, for certain payors, patients are given the option to pay their out of pocket expense via Instamed. Instamed turns around and sends a virtual card payment to our lockbox, but it can take a few weeks for the payment to get to our billing company. Not sure if that's mail delay or Instamed milking the float, but I suspect both. For example, today we received a payment the patient initiated four weeks ago on Nov 24.
Patients are understandably upset that we haven't posted their payment in a timely fashion, and by the time our billing company gets the payment, the expiration date is often approaching..for example, the one received today expires 12/31.
The alternative seems to be to set up EFT with Instamed, but they want us to agree to an exorbitant fee much higher than the merchant fee we would pay on the virtual card payment.
I wondered if anyone has figured out how to solve this problem and either get Instamed to forward the virtual card payment more quickly (perhaps electronically), or negotiate the EFT fee to something similar to the credit card merchant fee, or better yet, zero.
Thanks in advance for any insight.
Dave
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David Smith FACMPE
Executive Director
United Imaging Consultants
Mission KS
(785) 393-8387
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