Digital Wallets More Popular at Doctor’s Office Than the Mall

Many consumers know they can use digital wallets to pay for their clothing, food and groceries — but how many realize that they can use digital wallets at the doctor’s office?

The answer: quite a lot. A projected 62 million U.S. consumers made their most recent healthcare payment using a digital wallet in Q3 2022, in fact, making these payments even more ubiquitous in healthcare than in retail.

Connected Wellness: The Next Prescription For Healthcare Providers — Digital Wallets, a PYMNTS and CareCredit collaboration, provides an overview of the digital wallet’s rise to the forefront of the U.S. healthcare payments space. We surveyed a census-balanced panel of 2,638 U.S. consumers about their most recent healthcare expenses to explore how the digital transformation of the U.S. economy is changing the way consumers pay for their healthcare.

Key findings from our research include the following:

• The economy’s digital transformation has helped make digital wallets the third-most common payment method in the healthcare space, behind only credit and debit cards. Twenty-four percent of all consumers used digital wallets to make their most recent healthcare payment.

• Patients who paid for healthcare online are more than twice as likely to pay via digital wallet than patients who paid for healthcare in person. Thirty percent of patients who paid online for their most recent healthcare expense used a digital wallet, yet just 18% of patients who paid in person for their most recent healthcare expense used digital wallets.

• PayPal is by far the most common digital wallet that consumers use for healthcare payments, both online and in person. In total, 13% of all patients in our survey used PayPal to make their most recent healthcare transaction.

These are just some takeaways of PYMNTS’ latest research into the ongoing digitization of the healthcare space. Connected Wellness: The Next Prescription For Healthcare Providers – Digital Wallets details how digital wallets made it to the mainstream of the healthcare space.

To learn more about the rise of the digital wallet-enabled healthcare payment, download the report.