Optometry offices had an inefficient insurance process that consumed office staff’s time. As a service-based business, they wanted a way to see more patients and maximize the cost-per-visit.
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Vision insurance benefits are as clear as mud to patients. If a patient receives a vision card—and they often don’t—they’re still frequently unsure of their co-pay or deductible amounts. As a result, patients may not use their vision benefits to the full amount.
Once a patient walks into an optometry office, their uncertainty over their vision benefits becomes the problem of the office staff. Instead of checking a patient in and sending them back to see the doctor, opticians spend 20-30 minutes searching through every vision care provider for a patient’s plan by manually entering a patient’s birth date on each site.
It’s estimated that for every patient seen, an optometry practice bills insurance $40 less because they aren’t able to find accurate benefit and coverage information. Instead of processing patients quickly, the check-in process was a bottleneck in an optometry office, limiting the number of patients that could be seen.
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Improving optometry practice inefficiencies began with decreasing the number of time opticians spent verifying vision insurance so that they could return to patient-focused care. The PracticePal solution gives optometry practices a quick and accurate way to not only search the five (5) major vision care providers to verify patient coverage on the spot, but also to help a patient utilize all of their benefits.
The Ventive team created the Eligibility & Benefits Search Engine (EBSE) to search through the major vision care providers in a fraction of the time. Working with PracticePal founders, Ventive developers knew that they wanted to make it easier for opticians to upsell patients on the benefits they already had. That’s why they included in the Optical Sales Tool the information that opticians needed to give exact amounts to the patients; in turn, this gave opticians more opportunities to point out that an extra pair of glasses or a premium pair of lenses was already covered by the patient’s insurance.
PracticePal makes it easy for patients to shop for optometry practices by price, and when patients are given accurate vision benefits information, they become more confident consumers who utilize their insurance policies.
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PracticePal automates what was previously a time-consuming task for opticians, and on average, optometry practices report that they’re able to save ten staff hours a week when they use the (EBSE). Practices are able to decrease their sales process from 30 minutes down to 5 minutes by using the PracticePal Optical Sales Tool (OST). Practices also report that they have a significant decrease in appointment no-shows and an increase in appointments scheduled because patients feel more confident using their vision benefits.
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