The Optometric Minute

3 COVID-19 Business Continuity Strategies

May 20, 2020

COVID-19 practice closures have challenged our financial security and ability to provide care. Here are a few business continuity strategies that helped my practice persevere through the shutdown, and now are continuing to bolster us in our reopening.

Automated Online Contact Lens Ordering
Most of us are accustomed to ordering things regularly online with ease and convenience. It’s the way shopping has shifted and it’s not going away. Most contact lens distributors and EHRs have online ordering plug-ins that you can have embedded in your web site to enable this feature easily. Then when patients input an order on your web site the order is directly communicated to the distributor and processed. You pay no hourly fee for this to happen and you’re earning revenue.

Outsource Insurance Filing
There is a fantastic service through VisionWeb called “Claim Management Solutions” that I’ve used for over three years. It’s a service where their team remotely logs into your system, files claims and only gets paid a small percentage of any payment you receive. If you don’t get paid, they don’t get paid. The math works out to be far less expensive than another employee would be, and their specialist gets me paid faster with a far lower rejection rate than we previously had when someone in office was filing.

Focus on What You Can Do Right Now
If you are still closed, or just starting now to reopen, but with a very limited patient volume, then you probably have countless hours of time to fill. I’ve shifted my focus to my reopening strategy. We have no control over this pandemic, but we can control how effectively we reopen. Get your mass communication technology ready and pre-write any messages to patients now so that you can streamline that process once you re-open, or as you further ramp-up your reopening. I highly recommend a communication technology like Weave if you don’t already have one.

 

Casey Packer, OD, is a certified optometric glaucoma specialist and therapeutic optometrist, and owner of Lone Star Eye, in Austin, Texas. To contact him: docpacker@gmail.com

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