In the flurry of day-to-day operations, it’s easy to overlook vital details that could make a big difference in your practice’s finances. Learn how the Academy’s benchmarking tool helped this CEO make a scheduling change that increased revenue per encounter. Enter your practice’s data – for free – through June 15 to get valuable insights on your practice.

AAOE board member Ann Hulett serves as CEO of EyeHealth Northwest, PC, a large, multi-specialty Ophthalmology practice in Portland, Ore.

AAOE: How did an Academetrics benchmarking insight help you make a positive change at your practice?

Hulett: The first year I noticed that our optometric revenue per encounter was higher than the median of the survey. It led me to wonder why and prompted a discussion in our practice about who should be seeing VSP and other Vision Plan patients. 

We determined that we had MDs seeing very low-paying visits, when we should have been scheduling those patients with the ODs. In turn, we had medical patients on OD schedules that should have been on MD schedules.

AAOE: Did Academetrics help you improve operations in any other ways?

Hulett: We used the cost-per-visit median number to help us analyze how each of our locations is performing according to our peers. That prompted good discussion about why he had such variation between locations.

Hulett’s tip for using the benchmarking tool:

Keep good notes the first year about the reports that you ran and the following year will go more quickly. Read the definitions very closely.