Despite being important to vision, comfort, quality of life, and surgical outcomes, most dry eye procedures aren’t fully covered by insurance. Seeing as though many patients require lifelong treatment, dry eye services can be a financial burden to patients of all ages, often decreasing compliance with recommended treatments. To help remove financial barriers, financing plays an important role for all patients. Providing an affordable way to pay for services encourages patients to get the recommended care to optimize the ocular surface for surgery.
“We offer CareCredit up front when we discuss the physician’s order. We usually break down treatment costs for patients — for example, $45 a month — in addition to sharing it in the paperwork,” says Patti Barkey, COE, CEO of Bowden Eye & Associates in Jacksonville, Florida. “We teach our staff that it’s not our place to predetermine who needs financing, but rather, to offer it to everyone and let patients decline if they don’t want it. Even if patients don’t need financing, and some do not, they all deserve the opportunity to decide which option is most convenient for them.”
HELPFUL TOOLS TO MAKE DRY EYE SERVICES MORE AFFORDABLE
CareCredit offers a variety of helpful tools to help practices make financing attractive and convenient for all their patients’ needs.
A Practice Development team will visit practices to assess their needs and help improve patient access to care. Online tools in the CareCredit Advertising Toolkit, for example, give practices an embedded calculator and budgeting charts, as well as direct application, for their websites and Facebook pages. The company supplies printed patient education materials as well.
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Outside of the practice, CareCredit sends about 50 million mail and email marketing messages a year to its cardholders, outlining ways to use their cards. Practices that use CareCredit are listed in the Online Provider Locator, which sees steady, high traffic of about 560,000 searches per month.
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At Patti Barkey’s practice, where patients use CareCredit to finance a range of dry eye procedures, patients use the CareCredit online tool to get prior credit approval. She explains, “We want the application process to be as convenient and simple as possible, so patients can focus on improving their vision and comfort.”
Paying for Much-needed Treatment
Dry eye treatment, particularly before surgery, is not just “nice to have”— it’s essential for ocular health, surgical outcomes, and satisfaction. According to John D. Sheppard, MD, MMSc, president of Virginia Eye Consultants, Norfolk, this necessity makes the offer of financing essential.
“It is enormously important to offer financing. When patients have to buy prescriptions, pay for insurance copays and a premium IOL, and take time off work, that is a big investment. When they need thermal pulsation therapy, nutriceuticals, and other interventions on top of that to prepare the ocular surface for surgery, it can become overwhelming,” he says. “By packaging all of these costs together, we can discount some of the cash items, as well as save patients the interest they would pay with a regular credit card. Doing the best thing for one’s eyes is an emotional issue, and we try to ease that emotional burden by eliminating the financial issue.”
In the experience of Elizabeth Yeu, MD, surgeon at Virginia Eye Consultants in Norfolk, patients can balk at the very concept of dry eye treatment, making them less open to paying for a procedure. She and her colleagues handle this with a combination of education and financing.
“There is a polarizing concept inherent in paying for treatments that aren’t covered by insurance. When we tell patients they have a disease, but treatment isn’t covered, they naturally doubt the veracity of the treatment. They would rather use cheap over-the-counter eye drops than pay for a doctor’s treatment,” she says. “It is our task to explain the disease, along with our surgical and dry eye counselors. They’re very good at communicating not only out-of-pocket costs and financing options, but also the current state of dry eye treatment. They explain to patients that there has been a boon of discovery in the last 5 to 7 years, changing our understanding of dry eye disease and how we diagnose and treat it. Insurance has not caught up yet.”
The bundling of dry eye treatment with surgery at Virginia Eye Consultants appeals to all generations. Older patients might bundle treatment with cataract surgery, while many millennials combine dry eye treatment with LASIK financing.
“The cost of dry eye treatment is easy to roll into surgical costs for LASIK and premium cataract surgeries, and we offer some dry eye services at reduced costs when they are bundled with surgery,” Dr. Yeu explains. “With 12 to 24 months of fair financing, patients appreciate that care is accessible to them. It also makes sense to offer it along with surgery, which has the potential to make them much more symptomatic without dry eye treatment.” •
FINANCING MADE EASY WITH CARECREDIT
Practices enrolled with CareCredit can now utilize an online Advertising Toolkit with free tools to promote and deliver financing to patients. Practices can add the toolkit’s professionally designed, customizable features to their websites and social media platforms to promote awareness of financing options and make sign-up easy.
For example, practices can upload to their site digital banners, buttons and logos, a payment calculator, and a Custom Apply Link that allows patients to apply for CareCredit directly from the practice website according to the practice’s own financing options. Practices can even share click-to-post social media content on Facebook and Twitter.
Visit carecredit.com for more information.
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