The ensuing is a guest piece by Saurabh Joshi, who serves as EVP and President at CSG Forte. Healthcare entities have devoted numerous years to updating the process of patient payment. Innovations such as portals, autopay, digital wallets, and third-party billing systems have streamlined payment processes, resulting in quicker, more accessible, and customer-oriented transactions.
Indeed, approximately 60% of individuals aged 60 and above assert that they are fairly confident in utilizing digital payments for healthcare expenditures. However, the industry has inadvertently acquired a fraud issue that it is unprepared to deal with. The increasing digitization of patient payment encounters creates opportunities for malevolent actors to exploit vulnerabilities in identity, access, and account security.
The problem is magnified by AI, which assists fraudsters in being quicker and more responsive in their assaults. Although the healthcare sector has been slower to embrace AI, it is crucial for organizations to take action immediately to counteract the fraud that AI itself facilitates.
In order to genuinely modernize the patient payment process in healthcare organizations, it is essential to simultaneously update the intelligence responsible for safeguarding these payments. This is because fraud has become embedded within the system. Payment fraud has typically been recognizable: a stolen card at a store, an unusual transaction, a straightforward instance of interception.
