Efficient Optometry Billing Eases Stress for a Busy Practice
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Optometrists Julie and Jay Honda recognized how a more efficient optometry billing process could positively impact their practice, motivate staff, and improve revenue. They needed an “extension” of their office staff to help manage their revenue cycle management (RCM).
After weighing the cost and benefits, Dr. Julie Honda searched for an insurance billing and RCM service that specializes in and excels in eye care. Below, Dr. Honda explains how she found a partner, Fast Pay Health, to work by her side for the past eight years to overcome billing challenges and keep the positive momentum going in her practice, all while getting paid faster.
What RCM challenges did you and your staff experience before you started with Fast Pay Health?
Challenge 1: Daily billing and posting often fell behind when someone was absent or had higher priorities.
Challenge 2: Verifying a patient’s insurance eligibility and benefits was an ongoing task that took around five to six hours per week, which was difficult to do between patients. Late scheduling changes meant someone had to verify insurance again.
Challenge 3: Sometimes, the claim wouldn't get paid if something slipped through the cracks—like a patient authorization or primary care provider verification. Time management can get the best of you when you have to verify insurance for last-minute scheduling changes.
Challenge 4: We had a challenging year during the COVID pandemic with staff instability and absenteeism.
How has Fast Pay Health helped you and your staff overcome RCM challenges?
Having a dedicated optometry billing team is like a little machine happily humming along in the background—completing 85% of the billing, posting, and eligibility and benefits verification tasks. We leave for the day, and the work is done when we return to the office the next morning.
We used to have a full-time billing person that we were extremely dependent on. The amount I had to pay this staff member, including benefits, cost more than a billing service. Now Fast Pay Health fills that role.
Outsourcing these highly demanding tasks have changed our outlook from apprehension and worrying about whether tasks had been completed to confidence and gratitude that they have been. This also has alleviated a lot of stress because we used to invest so much time in training new employees if the billing person was absent or moved on.
If a part of the billing cycle isn’t operating smoothly—or in a timely fashion—it affects everything else. Before you know it, primary claims can’t be filed because you fell behind in checking the patient’s insurance or eligibility. Secondary claims and billing are delayed as well.
For a business to survive, you must get paid for your work, especially when your practice has a high volume and overhead. Streamlining the billing process and making it as efficient as possible is critical to that success.
Building lasting relationships within our community is one of the great joys we have experienced in private practice. Now that our staff isn’t buried under the constant demands of insurance verification and filing claims, they can spend the extra time making sure our patients feel welcome and appreciated. They also have more time to immediately answer questions and address any concerns a patient may have.
How has Fast Pay Health reduced accounts receivable at your optometry practice?
Doing the kind of volume our practice does makes it difficult to find one optometry billing person to handle everything. I no longer worry about staff being absent when we need to bill insurance companies, post payments, or run reports.
Eligibility verification helps us estimate the co-payment beforehand so we collect the patient’s co-payment and reduce billing issues from the start.
Fast Pay Health is skilled in identifying and correcting problems and implementing systems to prevent future errors. They make all necessary billing corrections on claims not accepted by the clearinghouse before submitting the claims, absorbing yet another task we previously had to address.
Billing rejections and denials are still reviewed by one of my senior staff members or me. But the huge time demand has been drastically reduced with Fast Pay Health filing claims, posting payments, and following up on unpaid claims.
The percentage of outstanding claims over 120 days is around 3%, and 94% of our AR aging bucket is either current or outstanding 31–60 days. It is much easier to follow up on older claims because there are fewer to deal with—and we continue to sustain this low level, thanks to the diligence and hard work of the Fast Pay Health team.
What is your favorite optometry billing service, and why?
I like the aging claims service the most—though posting and verification are also a huge help. The fact is that 10% of messy claims can take up 90% of your time. With denied and rejected claims, Fast Pay Health handles these time-consuming phone calls to insurance companies, so our staff doesn’t have to worry about them.
Before, our staff members used to wait until we had a half day without patient appointments to make time for tending to aging claims. Since we are located in Hawaii, our staff's available time slots often did not coincide with insurance companies in other time zones, leaving little time to resolve unpaid claims.
If, for some reason, the primary claim was not paid—and we had to wait to resolve it before filing the secondary claim—it would take even longer to complete the claims filing process. This greatly increased the billing cycle for us and made it less likely for the claim to be paid at all.
Our Fast Pay Health team understands the field of optometry and the nuances of optometry medical claims. Plus, they have extensive experience with Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and secondary insurance specific to optometry and regularly make suggestions for corrections.
How does Fast Pay Health reduce your time managing benefits and eligibility verification?
We coordinate patient eligibility verification when our Solutionreach appointment reminders go out to the patients seven days prior. Patient data is easily accessible in our MaximEyes optometry practice management software since it integrates with Solutionreach. Fast Pay Health verifies insurance six days in advance—this way, we are not verifying as many patients who cancel appointments.
Each day Fast Pay Health checks for stragglers that end up on the schedule after finishing that day’s verification. They locate last-minute appointments and verify the add-ons. Our staff members are only left with verifying perhaps one or two patients who ended up scheduling the same day or a patient whose insurance hasn’t been updated in the system.
To support our collaborative process with Fast Pay Health, we set up a color-coding system to signal verification and whether the co-payment estimation has been calculated. Each staff member knows exactly what needs to be done daily and whether we need to get information from the patient before or during the visit.
You’ve been using Fast Pay Health for eight years. Any advice to eye care professionals?
Partnering with Fast Pay Health is one of the better decisions we have made in managing our practice. Their team is a welcome extension of our office staff. The team is well-trained, has a positive attitude, and has a fierce work ethic. Anytime I email the team about a specific claim, I get an immediate response and action taken by the follow-up team.
I see Fast Pay Health as an investment rather than an expense. Considering what it takes to get AR under control and sustaining it at a low level consistently, using an optometry billing service has saved us time and money. No longer is our staff unnecessarily stressed or pulled in so many directions daily, which affects our bottom line and our ability to provide the best patient care.
Lastly, on a personal note, the team comprises a select group of grateful, humble, hard-working individuals who have sculpted my ideal of what being a team is all about. We constantly feel supported and that they truly take pride in doing the best job possible. They have even thanked me for correcting them so that they can be more efficient and do a better job for us and our practice.
Fast Pay Health has been a huge contributor to our practice's success—working tirelessly, often without credit, behind the scenes to get the job done. I’m extremely grateful to have their team by our side. They specialize in alleviating the burden of billing and giving you well-needed peace of mind.
Experience the Positive ROI of Outsourcing Optometric Billing & RCM
Ready to experience a positive return on investment when you outsource eye care billing? Fast Pay Health optometric billing consultants will help you get started, and we work with ANY eye care practice management software. Request a free practice analysis today—we’re just a form submission away.
