Getting up to date with your community

[bullgoose]

The tech world, banking and other practice management software have known for years about chip technology. I live and work in the center of technology and look to some of my patients that I am "behind the times". Practiceworks is just now, even after I have prodded them for the last 3 years, starting to develop this technology.  I am told that it will be out to Oral Surgeons within the first quarter of 2017 but not to General Dentists until late this year. hey guys, you developers at Practiceworks, get with the times, help your users to "look sharp, be sharp and up to date.

This same issue extends to only a single contracted credit card processor who's fee are significantly higher than all other processors that I have surveyed. Reach out to your users with better choices, or at least  a few so they can compare and choose. Current company is not ammenable to negotiating.

[matt_ackerman]

Thank you for your feedback, Dr. Bocks!  Great topic, especially since we will be including this functionality in an upcoming release of PracticeWorks.  We have been watching the EMV topic for several years, and based on our assessment and the input from the customer base at large, there has not been overwhelming support to rush into delivering chip-and-PIN ahead of the market.  As a result, we have been working to develop other more impactful features while we kept a finger on the pulse of that topic.

While we evaluated the EMV changes, we learned that one of the major benefits of this program (to reduce the fraud and chargeback risk to the merchant) didn't really apply to our healthcare market.  In fact, over the millions of dollars worth in charges we processed in 2015 and 2016, less than three one-hundredths of one percent (0.03%) resulted in chargebacks because of fraudulent payments.  The data clearly didn't support the attention the topic was getting; going to the dentist is typically not the sort of thing someone does with a stolen credit card.

Even though we believe that card fraud is a minor issue in the healthcare field, we are still doing the work to evolve our ePayments system to support EMV-capable transactions.  We have already completed all the toolkit, under-the-hood, changes required to implement these changes, and now we just need to integrate the ePayments toolkit with PracticeWorks.  The work to complete ePayments is scheduled to begin soon, and I am estimating that the software release will be available in Q3 2017.  Of course, that is still a ways off, so stay tuned for updates on the schedule.

Many people have considered the ePayments service we offer as an integrated part of PracticeWorks to be very valuable, but I have heard feedback that TransFirst, our service provider, is too expensive.  In those cases, I would encourage those customers to work closely with us to understand the REAL costs of what you would pay with our service and what some competitors are really charging you -- I think that in a lot of cases we can be very competitive.  I am also certain that TransFirst is willing to negotiate with you to win your business.  And when you consider the time savings of an PracticeWorks-integrated solution, the decision is easy to make.