Doctors and their patients are providing strong resistance to Medicare's efforts to migrate payments to online and Eftpos channels. However, as that resistance is being worn down, the Eftpos channel looks to be coming off second best to online claiming.More than one year after Commonwealth Bank launched its Medicare Easyclaim product, dubbed Easyclear, the market for the reverse-Eftpos Medicare claiming has so far largely failed to materialise.Just 88,000 Easyclaim payments were made to patients in the six months to December. Latest figures supplied to The Sheet by Medicare yesterday indicate that progress has been made in 2008 to improve on those numbers.Easyclaiming was associated with the previous federal government's access card project and seems to have taken a back seat in Medicare's planning and priorities to the online payments project.Whilst Medicare's online claiming project is also failing to meet targets, it is starting to make significant progress now with about 3000 people completing the cumbersome registration process each day.Sixty-seven per cent of bulk bill claims by doctors are now done online, well short of Medicare's target of 94 per cent for 2008. Just 13 per cent of patient claims are conducted online, well short of Medicare's target of 65 per cent for this year.Medicare Australia deputy chief executive, Rona Mellor, said in an email yesterday that the total number of bank account details collected for 2007/08 was not reported in the annual report but was now over one million records (out of about 12 million Medicare cards currently on issue)."As the public become more aware of the advantages of on-the-spot claiming, they are increasingly willing to provide their bank account details to Medicare Australia," wrote Mellor."Practices have been identified that have high manual patient claiming volumes. Medicare Australia field staff are contacting and visiting these practices to promote the electronic claiming choices, provide information and raise awareness about access to incentives."