Will Your Healthcare IT Clients Be Ready For EMV By October?

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Your Healthcare IT clients may be seeing increased responsibility for fraudulent use of credit cards at their facilities if they aren’t up to EMV standards by October 1 of this year.

EMV cards are currently being issued to all cardholders and will soon be showing up at your clients’ payment points, if they aren’t already. EMV cards contain chips that generate a unique, one-time-use PIN for every transaction, and effective October 1, the new EMV standard takes effect for in-store and face-to-face payments. According to Lexology, that means that after that date, doctors, hospitals, and other providers will be held responsible for fraudulent use of a credit cards that takes place on their premises if they have not yet upgraded their point of sale (POS) terminals (if the chip technology could have prevented the fraud.)

What Your Clients Need

Now is the time to start discussing solutions.

These will include an audit process of hospital and clinic payment processing systems, inventory of the POS systems, and initiation of deployment of new, chip-enabled terminals.

Deployment will involve installing chip-enabled, dual interface terminals that can support contact chip and magnetic-stripe interfaces.

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As you address the issue with your clients, remember these four lessons learned from the Canadian implementation of EMV solutions:

• Procrastination is human nature.
• Consumers won’t have trouble getting used to EMV.
• E-Commerce fraud rose after EMV a decade ago, but the industry adjusted.
• VARs need to get implementations right.