The Official VisionWeb Blog

Optometry patient care involves getting to know your patients' names and faces, especially those who return year after year. However, you'll sometimes encounter a patient who returns after they've been rude, left a bad review, complained about your products, or caused a scene in your practice. How do you react in these situations?

We first have to keep in mind that we all have bad days and make mistakes. Usually, the best course of action in the face of conflict within your practice is to keep neutral. You want the patient to feel cared for, think highly of your professionalism, and hopefully return. This doesn't change for negative patients. Let's go over three common scenarios and how you can respond to them.

Sometimes practices outgrow their space, expand their staff quickly, or are required to move due to landlords and building policies. However, moving can cause unexpected stress on your staff and stop growth for your practice. Not to mention, moving can confuse loyal patients or result in a loss of local customers.

Moving your practice is kind of like moving your home, but exponentially more difficult if you have servers, paper files, and other secure patient data onsite. That's why we encourage you to question whether your practice would benefit from uprooting its physical location or whether something else might satisfy your need for change. 

Making personal connections, interacting with a team, and keeping motivated at work can mean very different things for different people. Each personality test is useful for highlighting different parts of your employees' way of thinking and functioning. 

The ancient enneagram assessment is more about individuals' emotions and self perception. The test divides people into 9 categories based on how they interact within society and how they fuel their internal self. 

Keep reading to see how you can boost your staff productivity using the Enneagram test.

Optometrists and all eyecare professionals aren't usually equipped with finance and money management skills during their training or education. However, like with any small business, it's essential that independent practice owners and office managers understand where their revenue is coming from, how they can improve their financial standing, and what areas of growth are available to their business.

We wanted to compile all our knowledge on claim management, billing, expenses, financial reports, and anything else you need to know about money in your practice into one, convenient guide. Click through to have your money questions answered.

Many ODs may notice their claims aren’t being reimbursed, and in many cases they don’t have the bandwidth to investigate or they don't know where to start in order to figure out what went wrong. For someone who doesn’t handle the billing process on a daily basis, fixing denials can be a daunting task.

However, if you have defined your processes, it’s just a matter of reviewing each of them to find out where it has broken down. For practices who don’t have a system in place for managing claims, an in-house biller might be the most obvious solution.

We want to examine the processes at a typical office and review the biggest mistakes that could be made at the following stages:

1. The OD Performs the Service
2. The Front Staff Invoices the Patient for the Services
3. A Biller Files the Claim
4. The Clearinghouse Scrubs the Claim
5. The Payer Accepts or Rejects the Claim
6. The Payer Produces an EOB/ERA
7. The Payment is Posted into Your PM System