Dr. Moscow says ABB Verify has made insurance verification much easier and simpler for both staff and patients, and has likely increased contact-lens sales because the system sends reminders to patients that they have unused material benefits. Patients often then reach out to the practice to order an additional supply of lenses.
Technology speeding efficiency for your staff while boosting the patient experience.
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Nov. 29, 2023
By Scott R. Moscow, OD
When a patient doesn’t know their vision insurance provider, you have a problem on your hands. Fortunately, we have a technology in our office that makes this scenario much easier. That technology is ABB Verify. It allows us to quickly and accurately check a patient’s insurance status before they arrive. If the patient doesn’t purchase contact lenses at the yearly exam, it automatically sends them reminders about unused benefits.
The result are patients who have smoother experiences in our office, and who often come back to make contact lens or eyewear purchases if they don’t do it on the day of their visit.
Happily Meet Patients’ Expectations
It may seem unreasonable to us as practice owners, but many patients consider insurance verification to be the doctor’s responsibility. They expect us to tell them about their insurance coverage, rather than the other way around. If they arrive at your office, and your team has to spend significant time looking up their insurance, they may get annoyed, and even more annoyed if it turns out their insurance isn’t what they thought it was.
With ABB Verify, we type in the patient’s name and date of birth, and quickly find all insurances the patient may apply to their visit.
Free Up Staff Time Or Avoid Having to Hire More
With insurance verification so simple and fast, thanks to ABB Verify, our six-OD practice is able to do without one additional full-time employee. For a smaller practice, the staff time savings from ABB Verify may mean saving an hour, or more, of staff time per day.
Sometimes a patient will arrive for a medical office visit, such as a glaucoma or macular degeneration check, after their yearly exam and will decide after that office visit that they also want to purchase eyewear while they’re here. ABB Verify makes it fast and easy to find their vision benefits in these situations where the staff may have only had their medical coverage pulled.
Make Online Appointment Bookings Easier for Staff
When patients call us, we ask about their vision insurance coverage over the phone. When patients make appointments online, they don’t always provide their vision insurance information. That makes having a technology like ABB Verify all the more important. Our staff can easily take the minimal demographic information about the patient, which patients have given us online, and use it to efficiently find out all their insurance coverage before their visit.
Reminding Patients that They Have Benefits to Spend in Your Office
Patients sometimes want to test out new contact lenses before purchasing so they don’t purchase the same day as the yearly exam. ABB Verify sends reminders about unused benefits, many times prompting patients to purchase additional contact lenses. That means you have additional chances to capture contact lens sales from your patients.
During appointments, when we know that the patient has multiple material benefits to use, we can mention it to them, noting the usefulness of additional eyewear. For instance, I might suggest a pair of computer glasses or prescription sunwear. That second-pair sale becomes more likely once the patient knows they have benefits they can put toward it.
Our contact-lens capture rate and overall per-patient revenue have gone up since implementing ABB Verify. This technology isn’t the only reason for the improvements of these metrics, but probably an important contributing factor.
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Create an Effortless Customer Experience for Patients
There’s a book I read recently, “The Effortless Experience: Conquering the Battleground for Customer Loyalty,” by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi. The message of this book is that patients will return to customer experiences that are the easiest and most convenient for them. When you make the insurance verification process as easy as we can with ABB Verify, they are more likely to return to our office.
Without a fast, easy way to accurately verify insurance, you are branding your office as sloppy and difficult to work with. The patient leaves with the impression that your office wasted their time while they waited for your staff to verify their insurance coverage. “Why didn’t they do this ahead of time?” they may wonder to themselves. Or: “Why is this taking them so long? Shouldn’t they have technology to quickly do this?”
You want your office to be remembered as modern and super-easy to do business with, in all ways, including how insurance is verified. When you have technology solutions like ABB Verify, this is easily accomplished.
Click here to learn more about ABB Verify.
Scott R. Moscow, OD, is the Clinical Director of Roswell Eye Clinic in Roswell, Ga. To contact him: scott@roswelleyeclinic.com
