O.D. to O.D

EYECARE REFORM

TO SURVIVE IN THE CHANGING HEALTHCARE SYSTEM, WE MUST ADAPT

Scot Morris
O.D. F.A.A.O
Chief Optometric Editor

UNTIL RECENTLY eye care has been somewhat insulated from most of the changes occurring across health care. The healthcare business is enormous, the business of eye care is small in comparison. We have small legal risk, a small financial footprint and a very small piece of the provider pie.

Yet, all of medicine suffers from the same ailments: Inefficient systems, over testing, incorrect coding and medical documentation, control by big business and the overwhelming apathy and loss of personal responsibility.

As we look forward, we face the integration of policies and platforms intended to push our medical system toward evidence-based medicine and better, more efficient and more effective care. To adapt, we will need to make changes.

Below are my Top Seven. They may be controversial, challenging and uncomfortable. They may tear at the fabric of what we have come to accept and expect. But if they make you think, then I have done my job!

1 PUT CONSUMERS FIRST We live in a new world of consumerism. If we don’t take care of our consumers first, then someone else will. If people leave our practices, it is largely our own fault. Take care of the consumer in front of you with complete eye care. Everything else can wait.

2 GET EFFICIENT Delegate tasks, delete certain procedures, refine scripts and processes. Constantly ask, “What could we cut out to make our processes more efficient and consumer exam times shorter?” Become more efficient now to make up for the increased time we will spend implementing many of the new changes including ICD-10s and value-based medicine.

3 ADOPT ICD-10 Adopt and implement ICD-10 — because you have to. It’s not going to get delayed this time. Plan now to make the October deadline much more tolerable. Remember CPTs are not changing, just the diagnostic codes.

4 DOCUMENT, TEST AND CODE CORRECTLY Perform the necessary services per our contracts and per medical necessity. Nothing more, nothing less. Doing more just to “get paid” is not only inefficient, it is unethical.

5 RUN THE BUSINESS We need to spend time working “on” our business, not inside our business. Our business is a hybrid of the service industry and retail in the healthcare sector. We need to embrace this fact and do it better than the business down the street… or we won’t exist.

6 STOP GIVING STUFF AWAY Get paid for what you do. Do what you get paid for. Stop giving stuff away. It devalues who we are and what we do. What we do is a highly specialized service. Charge accordingly! If we don’t like what we are getting paid for our services, maybe we should stop letting people pay us that way. Enough said.

7 EVALUATE THE PLANS YOU TAKE Our industry will likely head in one of two directions. We will become a service-only industry, similar to general medicine, without the right to sell retail visual solutions, or we will become a personalized “concierge style” industry. Both come with advantages and challenges. Though we currently benefit from inclusion within the Medicare/Medicaid, as well as third party managed care inclusion, it is foreseeable that at some point in the future this may not be so advantageous.

START TODAY

What we do every day matters. It is the little things that create reform. It starts with each one of us. Next time we look in the mirror, each of us will likely see the solution to our own problems. We just have to want to reform. Do you? OM