About Extension
Ava EMR is a comprehensive, physician-designed electronic medical record used by clinics across Canada. Today, thousands of providers in hundreds of clinics rely on Ava to support day-to-day care. Ava includes integrated provincial billing to support insured claims and reconciliation with provincial health services. Through Helcim’s integration with Ava, clinics can also accept private billing payments, including co-pays, uninsured services, and outstanding balances, securely inside Ava EMR using transparent interchange-plus pricing. Together, this keeps both insured and private billing workflows in one system, reducing costs, streamlining operations, and eliminating manual reconciliation.
Watch demo
Install Extension
Assured HIPAA Compliance.
Process payments confidently knowing your clinic's PHI is protected. Download Helcim's HIPAA Management Assertion now to see how we ensure compliance.
Features
Process private billing payments, inlcuding invoices, co-pays, and outstanding balances—directly inside Ava EMR without exporting billing data or leaving their EMR.
Reduce double entry and manual updates—payments flow through Helcim while your administrative staff stays in Ava EMR.
Helcim safeguards patient payment data with PCI compliance, tokenization, and a rigorous PIPEDA and HIPAA compliance program backed by annual audits—ensuring secure, fast, and reliable checkout.
Keep more of your revenue with Helcim's transparent interchange-plus pricing.
Already have your customer’s card data with another provider? Helcim offers free card data migration, allowing you to securely transfer your existing customer card information so you can use it with the Payment Extension.
Need to process payments without creating an invoice? POS mode lets you accept custom payment amounts, combined totals, and payments that don’t originate from your third-party software, directly within the Extension.
How it works with Helcim
With the Helcim Payment Extension, clinics using Ava EMR can take private billing payments directly through the Ava’s private billing module. Helcim handles card-present payment processing. Since private billing payment processing is done via Helcim, you benefit from lower fees, secure compliance, and unified reporting — while appointment scheduling, charting, and provincial billing continue inside Ava EMR. Refunds or adjustments outside the system may still need manual updating.
Requirements
Setup
Create a free Helcim account. If you already have one, you can skip this step.
Install the Helcim Payment Extension to your browser from the Chrome Store.
Follow the guide that appears after downloading the extension. It will prompt you to log in to your Helcim account to sync the extension, and then select a currency.
If you have a Card Reader Gen 3 or Smart Terminal, you can pair it by copy-pasting your 4-digit device code onto your Payment Extensions tab in Ava EMR.
FAQs
Yes — Helcim’s interchange-plus pricing is often lower and more transparent than default private billing payment processors, helping reduce your clinic’s transaction costs.
Yes — Helcim can be used to process payments inside Ava EMR, allowing you to collect payments for private billing and outstanding balances.
You gain lower fees, secure PCI-compliant payment handling, unified payment reporting, and the convenience of processing payments directly inside your existing EMR workflow instead of juggling separate systems.
Ava already includes comprehensive billing features and direct integrations with provincial health services for claims and reconciliation. The Helcim Payment Extension specifically enhances Ava’s private billing workflows, allowing clinics to securely accept patient payments such as uninsured services, co-pays, and outstanding balances directly within Ava EMR.
This partnership strengthens how clinics manage private billing without changing how insured billing is handled, keeping all billing activity clearly separated, efficient, and within a single system.