Merchant Advocate Health provides core services via three integrated channels to help hospitals with their merchant accounts:
Forensic Analysis
Merchant Advocate Health performs a cost-free, commitment-free, granular forensic analysis of a hospital’s accounts to assess their baseline status. Historically, 70% of the accounts analyzed by Merchant Advocate Health have opportunity for savings.
Account Optimization
In accounts where savings are achievable, Merchant Advocate Health perform account optimization. On behalf of the hospital or physician group, optimization is achieved by Merchant Advocate Health working with the individual banks and processors to clean up back end errors, reduce rates and maximize efficiency. This step does not require a replacement of the client’s established bank or processor.
Monthly Monitoring
Once the accounts have been optimized and savings are achieved, Merchant Advocate Health operates monthly monitoring of the optimized accounts to ensure continued compliance by the processor. This last step is crucial since many banks and processors will often reinstitute higher costs soon after optimization, without the knowledge of their customer.
For a hospital, patient payment is just one example of credit card payment revenue. Others include retail outlets inside the facility such as the cafeteria, gift shop, outpatient pharmacy, medical supplies, and parking garages. In addition, some insurance companies are increasingly remitting their payments to hospitals via credit card methods rather than traditional EOB. As a result, hospitals and physician practices often have multiple merchant accounts to handle the inflow of credit card payments. The costs associated with these accounts can be difficult to assess and manage.