How Collaborative Optometry Billing Improves Your Bottom Line
/
Collaboration is important for any optometry office—billing and patients must be managed with equal care. If you and your staff are currently buried beneath a pile of unpaid claims and eligibility verification, it’s time to find a solution for improving your optometry billing process and your bottom line.
When office manager Michelle Schoch with Vision Center Ltd in Shelton, CT was ready to overcome her revenue cycle management obstacles, she realized she had to stop trying to manage everything on her own. Michelle turned a corner when she selected an optometry billing service provider to help lighten the load. Within three months, this new collaborative approach paid off.
What revenue cycle management obstacles did you experience as an office manager before you started working with Fast Pay Health?
Our office faced several big hurdles with revenue cycle management (RCM) before working with Fast Pay Health. Keeping up with insurance payment postings and billing patients for deductibles, copays, and coinsurance amounts they owed were constant tasks we never seemed to be able to manage effectively.
Verifying insurance coverage before patients came into our office was also very challenging. We found it difficult to identify any lapse in coverage or insurance plans that we may or may not participate with.
What solutions did Fast Pay Health put in place to help you move past these RCM obstacles?
Fast Pay Health keeps track of all electronic remittance advice (ERA) and posts insurance payments directly into our system. After that, they simply send me a summary of which patients need to be billed.
They will also bill the patient for you, but I chose to handle that part of the RCM process myself. The customizations they offer with their optometry billing services allow you the freedom to choose where you need the most support, and what can remain in-house with your staff.
How does Fast Pay Health help you save time with eligibility verification?
As long as we have entered the patient’s current insurance information, Fast Pay Health checks the patient’s medical plan and their vision coverage ahead of time. There are fewer surprises with eligibility verification when the patient arrives, which makes the check-in process quicker and easier for everyone.
How have you improved coding reviews and corrections in your optometry billing process?
With Fast Pay Health, they check all of our claims via coding review before they’re even submitted. If for some reason we do have a denial, they take care of the claim correction and resubmission as well.
Can you share how claims submissions for both vision and medical payers is different with Fast Pay Health?
Overall, the optometry billing process is similar to when we were submitting claims on our own. The big difference is that the process is way more efficient with Fast Pay Health. These improvements free up our time to focus on our patients and other priorities.
Photo provided by Vision Center Ltd.
How is managing AR follow-up for all of your payers now?
Managing accounts receivable (AR) is a breeze. Fast Pay Health sends me a list of any unpaid claims that either need review by the office or still require action on the patient’s end. In the past, unpaid claims would be lost to AR.
Using Fast Pay Health has dramatically changed our office. Quicker turnaround time on claims and billing have improved both our bottom line and our stress load. I’m not even sure how we were doing it before.
What do you like about working with the Fast Pay Health team?
The Fast Pay Health team is extremely responsive any time I have a question or concern. They are very open to adjusting their service offerings based upon the individual needs for our office.
For example, when we treat patients with HUSKY insurance—the state of Connecticut Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program—we prefer to send eyeglass claims ourselves. Typically, we submit these claims directly through the state website. We’re able to tell immediately if a patient is covered or not covered so that we can get the glasses made and dispensed to the patients faster.
Fast Pay Health has been accommodating with our HUSKY patients by handling only the exam portions. They let us take care of the claims so that our patients didn’t have to wait a week or two for glasses. Together, we are offering better service to our patients.
You’ve been working with Fast Pay Health for a year now. Any advice to other office managers to help them get the most out of these optometry billing services?
Trust the process...it will pay off for you and your staff in the long run. I was a little skeptical in the beginning about how outsourcing optometry billing services could possibly work so seamlessly. It just does, and it’s wonderful.
You have to be willing to let go and allow a team like Fast Pay Health to step in to provide support and expertise. Anytime you partner with a new service provider, there is a learning curve that’s expected. About three months in, I thought...wow, this is awesome.
About Michelle Schoch: Michelle is the office manager for Vision Center Ltd, a 4-doctor optometry practice located in Shelton, CT.
