We had a comment from a reader:

"Excellent post.This is the simplest way of gathering the health information."SmartPay" sounds like a good idea. But...the key, as always is how secure it really will be."

 Security is a growing concern for many of us nowadays. In fact, increased security is one of the many good reasons  to switch to e-invoicing with SmartPay.

First, think about the security level of paper billing.

You receive a bill in the mail and write a check. If you're at home, you put it out in your mailbox, which you don't guard at all. If you're sending a check from the office, it passes through many people's hands before it reaches the mail carrier. Either way, it then goes to a large facility filled with strangers who touch it and pass it along. It goes through more adventures in trasit to the city where you're sending it, with even more opportunities for tampering.

Another mail carrier takes it to its destination, where it passes through the hands of several people before reaching the person responsible for it. That person processes it and then leaves it in an insecure place until time to take it to the bank, where it is touched by many more people. At the bank, of course, it's processed electronically.

With SmartPay, your invoice and payment are processed electronically in the first place. Your transaction doesn't go through dozens of hands, facing the possibility of loss or theft as a check does. 

SmartPay transactions take place at a secure portal. When you think of eletronic billing, you may imagine that your private information is traveling around the internet, available to anyone as this blog post is. This is not the case. A secure portal means that the information goes directly from one server to another. It doesn't enter the same information stream that online information does. It is not on the World Wide Web.

Far from being a security risk, your SmartPay transactions are far more secure. 

What's more, the information itself is much more secure. A paper ledger, a check, a remittance form -- these papers all have sensitive information on them,and few people are really careful with these papers. Someone can see this information and copy it down without your ever being aware that anyone has gained access to the information. Payment systems on a business computer are also available for unscrupulous people to look at, unlike SmartPay's secure portal, where you or your cusomers can see all the necessary data without sharing it with others or leaving it where others can access it.

Computers don't steal money or information; people do. Using SmartPay offers a level of security far beyond what you can achieve with paper billing.