How to leverage outsourcing in your eye care practice

Outsourcing can increase revenue for your optometry practice. It can also improve its operational efficiency, reduce errors, and elevate the quality of patient care. But, getting started with outsourcing can seem like a daunting task. At least, it felt that way to us way back when we first started with our own clinic.

Consider this article a primer on outsourcing for optometrists and ophthalmologists. To give you a lay of the land, we’ll break down the most common functions to outsource from the front office to the back. We’ll share from our experience which functions are the highest ROI, the easiest to start with, and the most brutal to outsource. That should give you all of the context you need to get started with outsourcing for your eye care practice.

Commonly Outsourced Functions in Eye Care Clinics

Outsourcing can be a game-changer for your optometry or ophthalmology practice. But knowing where to begin can be overwhelming. In this section, we’ll introduce you to everyday tasks that are frequently outsourced. To make things more digestible, we’ll divide these functions into front-office and back-office categories, with additional focus on other support functions and specialized tasks.

Front Office Functions

• Appointment Scheduling: Leveraging an external service for appointment booking, confirmations, and cancellations can optimize your front office workflow. This allows your in-house team to devote their attention to patients present in the clinic, enhancing the quality of service.
• Customer Service: Outsourcing your customer service functions, including call centers to handle patient inquiries, feedback management, and complaint resolution, can significantly improve the patient experience while freeing up valuable time for your internal staff.
• Reminder Services: A professional outsourcing service can handle appointment reminders sent to patients via text, email, or phone calls, ensuring you maintain patient punctuality and reduce no-shows.

Back Office Functions

• Medical billing and coding are complex processes that require specialized knowledge. Outsourcing these tasks can increase accuracy, ensure legal compliance, and expedite claim processing.
• Accounts Receivable and Collections: An external agency can effectively track unpaid bills and ensure timely payment collection from patients and insurance companies, improving your practice’s financial health.
• Insurance Verification involves verifying patients’ insurance coverage details to prevent claim denials and rejections, safeguarding your clinic’s revenue cycle.

Other Support Functions

• Human Resources: HR tasks such as recruitment, training, payroll, and benefits administration can be outsourced to save time and ensure compliance with employment laws.
• Marketing and Public Relations: Leveraging professional agencies for online marketing, social media management, public relations, and other advertising efforts can broaden your clinic’s reach and enhance your brand.
• IT Support: Outsourced IT support can ensure smooth management of electronic health records (EHRs), timely software updates, prompt troubleshooting of technical issues, and stringent network security.
• Supply Chain Management: Outsourcing procurement, inventory management, and logistics can ensure your clinic has the necessary supplies and equipment when needed without tying up too much capital in inventory.
• Data Analysis: Professional services can perform sophisticated data analytics, identifying patterns and trends to improve decision-making and strategic planning.

Specialized Tasks

• Telehealth Services: As telehealth becomes increasingly important, management of these services can be outsourced to provide patients with seamless online consultations while ensuring compliance with regulations.
• Quality Assurance: Outsourcing can help comply with healthcare regulations, conduct patient satisfaction surveys, and improve service quality. These efforts ultimately enhance the patient experience and your clinic’s reputation.

High ROI Tasks that Maximize Outsourcing Returns

When starting, understanding which outsourcing tasks yield the highest Return on Investment (ROI) is fundamental. These are tasks that, when outsourced, can significantly boost your clinic’s revenue or result in substantial cost savings. Here’s a more detailed look at functions offering the greatest ROI:

• Billing and Coding: Given the complexity and constant changes in coding regulations, errors and denied claims are all too common when these tasks are handled in-house. Each denied claim is potential revenue lost. Outsourcing these tasks to expert coding services ensures high accuracy, reducing denials and increasing your revenue. Furthermore, by freeing your staff from these duties, you can allocate their time to patient care, improving satisfaction and potentially growing patient volume.
• Accounts Receivable and Collections: Every delayed or unpaid bill directly impacts your clinic’s financial health. By outsourcing to dedicated professionals, you ensure consistent follow-ups on unpaid bills, faster collections, and less revenue slipping through the cracks. With the reduced time spent on collections, your staff can focus on more strategic tasks, making your operations more cost-effective.
• Marketing and Public Relations: While the upfront cost of hiring professional marketing agencies might be significant, the potential ROI is high. Expert marketing can expand your clinic’s visibility, attract new patients, and increase patient retention. Every new patient gained or retained directly increases your revenue and profitability.
• IT Support: Employing a full-time, in-house IT specialist can be costly. Outsourcing this function saves on those costs and ensures timely technical support, reducing downtime. With outsourced IT support, you also enhance data security, mitigating the risk of potentially costly breaches and regulatory fines.
• Data Analysis: Outsourcing data analytics can yield vital insights into operations, patient care, and financial management. The cost of investing in a professional data analysis service can be offset by the savings and operational improvements they can identify. These insights can drive strategic changes, increasing profitability and better patient outcomes.
• Telehealth Services: Implementing telehealth services through an outsourced provider extends your clinic’s reach and appointment availability. This expansion can attract more patients, especially those who prefer remote consultations. This incremental increase in patient volume can significantly boost your revenue, justifying the investment in telehealth services.
• Supply Chain Management and Insurance Verification: Supply Chain Management which involves outsourcing procurement, inventory management, and logistics, can help ensure that your clinic has the necessary supplies and equipment when needed without tying up too much capital in inventory. This strategic outsourcing has the potential for significant cost savings and efficient resource allocation. Additionally, insurance verification, which involves verifying patients’ insurance coverage details, helps prevent claim denials and rejections, safeguarding your clinic’s revenue cycle.

While the tasks outlined above offer high ROI, they might not always be the most accessible for practices new to outsourcing. For example, while outsourcing Billing and Coding can bring significant returns, it requires careful transition planning due to the complexities involved. This includes training your staff on the new processes, establishing communication lines with the outsourcing partner, and adapting your billing cycle to the new setup. Ensuring these changes do not disrupt patient care or overwhelm your team is crucial. 

Easy-to-Outsource Tasks and Why They Make a Great Starting Point

Picking tasks that are the easiest to implement helps ensure a smooth start to outsourcing. This will allow your clinic to gradually build its outsourcing competence while ensuring a smooth and seamless transition for your team and your patients.

1. Appointment Scheduling: This task is relatively straightforward to outsource as it primarily involves basic customer service skills. An outsourced service can handle booking, confirmations, rescheduling, and cancellations, freeing up your front office staff to focus on in-person patient care. Its simplicity and direct impact on reducing staff workload make it an excellent first step into outsourcing.
2. Reminder Services: These services generally send automated reminders about appointments, follow-ups, or medication schedules. Because this task has a clear process and minimal complexity, it can be efficiently handled by automated systems or remote teams, reducing your staff’s workload and increasing patient compliance with schedules.
3. Customer Service: While the complexity can vary, basic patient inquiries, feedback management, and complaint handling can be successfully outsourced. With well-crafted scripts, thorough training, and an emphasis on tasks like feedback management and complaint resolution, an external team can effectively manage this function, enhancing your clinic’s responsiveness without placing additional pressure on your in-house staff.
4. Medical Billing and Coding: Although this task requires specialized knowledge, it’s a well-established field in healthcare outsourcing. Numerous companies offer expertise in this area, and the process is quite standardized across the industry, reducing the effort required for transition.
5. Data Entry and Transcription Services: These tasks involve entering information into electronic health records (EHRs) or transcribing medical notes. They require accuracy and attention to detail but are usually easy to outsource due to their repetitive nature and minimal need for specialized medical knowledge.
6. Marketing and Public Relations: Though this task might require specific industry knowledge, numerous specialized agencies have experience in healthcare marketing. Functions like managing social media, creating newsletters, and drafting press releases can be easily outsourced, freeing your team from tasks outside their core competencies.

While these tasks provide an easy onramp to outsourcing, it’s still important to know which functions are hard to offload. More challenging outsourcing functions require a deeper understanding of your practice’s needs, a more complex transition process, or more time to integrate with an external provider. These ‘harder-to-outsource’ tasks often yield significant ROI; hence, as your clinic grows more comfortable with outsourcing, they become the next frontier to conquer. These tasks, which we’ll cover in the next section, offer a pathway for your practice to mature into a more advanced outsourcing model, optimizing cost and efficiency.

Graduating to Harder Functions to Outsource

While some functions are relatively easier to outsource, others demand higher expertise, more specific industry knowledge, and a deeper understanding of your practice’s unique needs. Here, we outline some more challenging functions and offer insights into why they are more complex to outsource. We also provide some initial guidance on approaching these tasks when you’re ready.

1. Medical Coding, Billing, and Insurance Verification: We just put medical billing and coding in the easy column. However, the complexities of medical coding and billing derive from the intricate knowledge required of medical terminologies, coding systems, billing procedures, and constantly changing healthcare regulations. Additionally, insurance verification is an integral part of this process, as it helps to prevent claim denials and rejections, thereby safeguarding your clinic’s revenue cycle. Doing everything from scratch—making your documentation, training, etc.—is hard. Finding an outsourcing partner who reliably complies with these strict regulations and can handle these interconnected functions can be daunting.
2. Telehealth Services: Although an emerging field, integrating telehealth poses challenges, primarily due to the technological requirements. Your provider needs to offer reliable, user-friendly solutions and comply with HIPAA and other privacy regulations.
3. Quality Assurance (QA): QA encompasses adherence to standards, regulations, and continuous monitoring of patient care quality. Outsourcing this is tricky due to its critical nature and the need for intimate knowledge of the practice’s procedures and values.
4. IT Support and Electronic Health Records (EHR) Management: These tasks are sensitive, requiring high-quality service, stringent data security, compliance with healthcare laws, and adaptability to your practice’s specific technology needs.
5. Human Resources (HR): Outsourcing HR is challenging because it involves sensitive information and critical processes. The outsourcing partner needs to comprehend the unique HR requirements of a healthcare setting.
6. Data Analysis: Effective data analysis requires technical skills blended with a deep understanding of the healthcare industry and your practice’s specifics. This mix makes finding a provider with the appropriate blend of industry knowledge and analytical prowess is challenging.

Navigating these complex tasks may seem daunting, but it’s by no means impossible. Many reputable companies specialize in these areas. The key lies in the meticulous vetting of providers to ensure they possess the qualifications, experience, and understanding of your practice’s specific needs.

For these challenging tasks, it’s wise to establish a roadmap that outlines the gradual integration of these functions. Start with areas where you feel most comfortable, and incrementally expand as your confidence in your outsourcing partner grows. Stay tuned for the following sections, where we’ll discuss how to evaluate potential partners, manage the transition, and track performance to ensure your practice gets the most out of outsourcing.

Starting Your Outsourcing Journey

Outsourcing is a significant decision and requires strategic planning and careful execution. Here are the crucial steps to ensure a successful transition:

1. Evaluating and Choosing an Outsourcing Partner: Choosing an outsourcing partner is critical to your success. Look for partners with a proven track record in eye care, positive references from other practices, competitive pricing, and an array of services matching your needs. Prioritize partners who firmly commit to HIPAA compliance and robust data security, as these are paramount in healthcare settings.
2. Developing a Strategic Plan: Once you’ve chosen an outsourcing partner, you must craft a strategic roadmap for the transition. This plan should outline which functions to outsource first (potentially those with high ROI or easier to manage), timelines for the change, and how to integrate the outsourcing partner with existing systems and processes.
3. Transitioning to Outsourced Functions: Successful transitioning requires meticulous preparation and open communication with your team. Set expectations about the transition process, acknowledging that there may be a short-term adjustment period. However, assure your team that the long-term benefits can outweigh the initial hiccups.
4. Setting Key Performance Metrics: Clear performance metrics are a must. Establish service level agreements (SLAs) or key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to each outsourced function. These metrics will set a benchmark for performance and help keep your outsourcing partner accountable.
5. Tracking and Improving Performance: Lastly, the effectiveness of outsourcing should be evaluated regularly. Use the previously set metrics to assess your outsourcing partner’s performance, identify areas for improvement, and ensure that the partnership remains beneficial.

By taking the time to carefully select your outsourcing partner, develop a detailed strategic plan, manage the transition effectively, and track performance, you can set your eye care practice up for success with outsourcing. And remember, outsourcing is not an all-or-nothing decision. You can start small and expand as your comfort level grows, capitalizing on the benefits while managing the risks.

In the final section, we’ll provide some insights from our own experience, shedding light on the journey we embarked upon when starting with outsourcing in our eye care practice.

Realizing the Full Potential of Outsourcing

For eye care practices, unlocking the total value of outsourcing means leveraging it to enhance operational efficiency, drive cost savings, and improve the quality of service. From our own experience, we’ve found that moving certain tasks out of the office, like answering calls, has been instrumental in maximizing clinic profit.

Here’s how an eye care clinic owner can evaluate if they’re effectively harnessing the power of outsourcing:

1. Performance Metrics: The most objective assessment comes from examining the key performance metrics set out at the beginning of your outsourcing journey. Metrics could include turnaround time for claims processing, reduction in billing errors, time to book appointments, or customer service response time. If these metrics improve, you’re on the right path.
2. Cost Savings: Outsourcing often aims to reduce costs through decreased staffing needs, lowered overhead, or increased efficiency. If significant savings are observed, which can be reinvested into the clinic, this suggests successful outsourcing.
3. Patient Satisfaction: Success in an eye care clinic hinges on patient care and satisfaction. If outsourcing leads to improvements such as shorter wait times, fewer billing issues, and more efficient service, this is a good sign. Utilize patient feedback and surveys to assess this.
4. Staff Feedback and Morale: Effective outsourcing can positively impact staff morale by freeing them from routine tasks and allowing them to focus on patient care. If there’s a noticeable uplift in staff morale and reduced burnout, this signals successful outsourcing.
5. Compliance and Quality of Service: In healthcare, compliance with regulations and quality of service are non-negotiable. If outsourced services meet these high standards, reduce error rates, and remain compliant, you’re leveraging outsourcing effectively.
6. Growth and Scalability: If your clinic can accommodate more patients, open new locations, or expand services due to resources saved by outsourcing, it’s a clear testament to successful outsourcing.

Periodic evaluation of these aspects can help clinic owners gauge their success with outsourcing and make necessary adjustments to maximize its benefits. Effective outsourcing is continuous, with constant refining and optimizing, but the benefits can be significant and transformative for your practice.

Final Thoughts on Leveraging Outsourcing for your Eye Care Clinic

Outsourcing is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and you have various options. You can outsource domestically, tap into international talent pools, or utilize a mix of both. The decision depends on your eye care practice’s unique needs.

You also have the option to choose between building your own processes, training, and monitoring systems; or partnering with a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company. BPOs handle these elements for you, offering expertise and structures to streamline the outsourcing process. They are specialized entities that manage specific functions for businesses, providing operational efficiencies, expertise, and often cost savings.

At My Business Care Team, we are a top-tier BPO specializing in optometry and ophthalmology clinics. We have helped numerous eye care clinics solve the complexities of outsourcing. We also share plenty of helpful advice and tips on our blog, whether you’re just getting started or looking to optimize existing outsourced functions.

Whether you’re doing it on your own or considering a partnership with a BPO, we’re here to help. We’re happy to answer any questions. After all, our mission is to help eye care clinics achieve their highest potential through effective outsourcing.