Paying a medical bill by way of a text message is convenient and quick, but there are risks to doing so.
There’s no disputing that text payment is very easy: One click to pay and be done with it. And in most cases, that is the end of the story.
But Lisa Nelson, an associate vice president at the University of Rochester Medical Center, suggests you trust your gut about text payment.
“If there ever is a time where … you’ve clicked it, then you’re like, ‘oh, this just doesn’t feel right. The first thing to do is (follow) the old adage, if you see something, say something,” Nelson said.
Call the help desk or call center of the provider to let them know that you think something has happened, Nelson said. Never be shy about making that sort of move; everyone will be better off if there is a problem.
But much of the responsibility for the uncertainty regarding text payment falls on the shoulders of the healthcare provider who often sends; hard-to-understand texts that seemingly come out of the blue.
“It’s not clear that we’re sending out text messages that are appropriate, or (they are) confusing," Nelson said. “I am constantly on our vendors who we partner with, (telling them), ‘you can’t just send a random text,’ ” she said.
Nelson herself doesn’t pay by text but instead uses the receipt of the text as a reminder to sign on to the provider’s patient portal and pay the bill there. Patient portals are relatively secure places to conduct financial transactions, regardless of where a security breach may have occurred, be it on the patient’s computer or the provider’s portal.
“The good news is that the MyChart, patient-portal stuff is kind of on its own server. It’s (digitially) locked in a different room so that if you … get infected and have opened up your, my chart, you can’t transmit it to the health system,” Nelson said.
“But the other part of that is that we also can’t transmit it back to the patient, she added. ,