Scott Snowberger, OD, is a partner with Stone Hill Optical in Pflugerville, Texas. For any small or growing eyecare practice, managing cash flow can be a challenging obstacle to overcome. For years, Dr. Snowberger's practice went the traditional route in terms of managing their insurance claims, and ultimately, their practice’s revenue flow.

To emphasize, Dr. Snowberger states, "when I say the traditional route, I mean we had two staff members dedicated to pulling insurance authorizations, submitting claims, and posting EOBs."

As their business continued to grow, they struggled with the stability and scalability of their claim filing processes. As a result, they started falling several months behind posting EOBs to their system. On top of that, employee turnover was causing them to fall even farther behind. These two obstacles led to a cash flow problem because they weren’t transferring patient responsibility balances to the patient in order to send out patient statements.

Because they were falling behind, he found himself, an OD, staying late after closing on several occasions submitting claims in order to keep up until they were able to get a new employee hired and trained on their processes. This disruptive cycle was not conducive to practice growth and he knew something had to change.

Finding a Solution That Fits

With in-house claim filing continuing to be a pain point, Dr. Snowberger decided to evaluate options of outsourcing. He states, "I’ll be honest, we were hesitant after having a bad experience with outsourcing in the past, but we were willing to give it another try. After doing research, we learned that VisionWeb, a company we had been successfully partnering with for years for order processing, offers billing services. We were much more confident in using a company we already trusted for a big part of our business."

The transition to using the new billing service wasn’t without a few hiccups. It took a month or two of working with their account manager to get their processes accurately in place. Once they solidified their problem spots, the handling of their account has gone smoothly. One of the immediate impacts they noticed right away was the speed at which their claim payments were being received. It was the quickest it had ever been.

Almost two years into outsourcing our claim filing and we’ve seen several benefits across the board:

1. Overall, our revenue cycle has sped up and we’re making more money because we are writing less off.
2. We never miss a deadline for timely filing.
3. We no longer worry if an employee will write off a claim because of its complexity.
4. We can send patient statements weeks or months sooner, making it easier to collect patient responsibility.
5. We’ve reduced workflow tasks for our own employees.
6. We’ve saved on payroll expenses as we no longer need to employ the full-time and part-time employees we had dedicated to these tasks.
7. Outsourcing this part of our business has stabilized our cash flow.
8. We are no longer at the mercy of employee attendance or turnover.
9. Our business has become scalable, and we aren’t falling behind after busy times or overpaying employees during the slow times.

Outsourcing to a revenue cycle management service was a profitable decision for our practice. We’re spending less than we were to process in-house and we have had, on average, a $10 increase in total cash received per refraction.