I think we take too many. Personally, I would only take VSP and self-pay the rest but my doc is afraid of losing too many pts. Even though this would free up the schedule from these time consuming, low profit, non-sustaining pats. oh well.
We take:
VSP
eyemed
spectera
BCBS
tricare
superior
VCD
Davis
Always Vision
Medicare
Coast to Coast
None!!!
Is Eye Med one plan or the 600+ under the Eye Med umbrella???
Last edited by Uncle Fester; 04-17-2014 at 05:18 PM. Reason: tweak...
Ohhh, how I can't wait for the next few weeks to fly by. Free again!!Originally Posted by optical24/7
that's a recipe for an endless stream of low paying patients... are you the practice or optical manager? Can you share what your net per patient, per plan is? Its easy to calculate with EMR, you can run a quick report.
You just divide up total payments from each plan (including copays), and then divide by the total number of patients you saw under each plan.
Unfortunately, I can't run that report becuase we don't do line item billing within Compulink. The doc doesn't like using it and prefers to transpose all the data into a custom Excel spreadsheet. The funny thing is that I don't think the spreadsheet can run that report either but no one has access to it except the doc so I can't verify.
I will tell you that IMO if we unloaded a full day of these managed care pts and replaced them with only three or so self pay patients then we would be making at least the same amount of profit but without all the wasted labor and pain of the billing management. We would have so much more room to grow our practice in the right direction and extra time to spend on these pts and organically grow with the the self pay.
bcbs (blue view)
some aetna
vsp
eyemed
davis (barf) (extra chunks)
medicare
meridian
medicaid
humanah
i think thats it but its late and im tired
I may have missed somthing
VSP
EyeMed
Davis
I'm Andrew Hamm and I approve this message.
So jealous it hurst!
The only benefit of insurance to a practice is the number of patients they send through your doors. VSP and Eyemed are the big guys and send the most and can be profitable, Spectera and Davis are next but your eyewear profit is nearly ZERO with them, and the rest are so minor they are hardly worth the bother. We take VSP, Eyemed, Spectera, and Superior. After Superior's recent shenanigans we reviewed our transactions with them over the last couple years and determined they accounted for 7% of our patients and had an eyewear materials conversion of less than 50%. It was an easy choice to drop that.
If you take all the effort you currently put into figuring out, authorizing, billing, and explaining to patients their benefits for all those piddly plans, and put it instead into increasing number of, retention, and profit per patient you could easily overcome anything lost by dropping those little plans. And every one we drop and recover from and improve over is just practice for the next one, until we all get to be well-oiled optical marketing machines many of our Optiboard peers are and can ditch insurance altogether.
I'll be pretty impressed if we can finally stomach ditching VSP. I know we could already make do without Eyemed and Spectera if we chose, but those are so ingrained and familiar that the costs are low and they are still profitable so we haven't been motivated to axe them yet. But VSP would be challenging.
2 office we take everything except Davis. 1 office we take none. 7 other offices we take a light mix of plans, but not many.
At all my offices, we utilize a third party company that allows the customer to make payments as low as $20 per month, and I get my money up front. It's called Visa.
Ophthalmic Optician, Society to Advance Opticianry
Too many...............
Just EYEMED here and that may even go. I'm sure everyone realizes that it's the insurances that have driven up the retail prices of eyewear. If you have a fair and honest markup, you'll get killed taking insurance. The other issue is that hardly anyone realizes that they have out of network benefits too. But don't worry, Luxottica™ will make sure everyone is taken care of....
Ditto!
B
Johns , Which insurance do you prefer most over the others ?
I don't really have a preference. I'm not a fan of Eyemed or VSP, but we make money on all of them. I won't take an insurance that we can't make a decent profit on. It is not unusual for us to be the sole provider for certain plans within a 30 mile radius of our office, because the competition doesn't understand, or don't want to be bothered with it. Our second pair sales are VERY high for our Medicaid patients.
Ophthalmic Optician, Society to Advance Opticianry
VSP only
Medicare and Medicaid
None!
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