Optometry Practices, Here's How To Outsource Marketing, Billing, Coding, HR & More

The CovalentCareers team was lucky enough to sit down with Dr. Dave Kading, OD, FAAO during Vision Expo East 2017. His practice, Specialty Eye Group of Kirkland, WA, has successfully outsourced a number of tasks and roles. He shared his insight with our team.

Dr. Kading has had a lot of success with outsourcing various marketing initiatives to freelancers. He notes that he’s used people from overseas, as well as those from the U.S., in order to do both print graphic design and website work. Dr. Kading notes that, “these people are professionals, and they understand how to keep our message consistent across multiple channels.” He adds that these freelancers will communicate with him, ensuring that he has the opportunity to make edits to their work, maintaining his tone and voice with all advertising.

If you feel overwhelmed by billing or coding at your practice, you might want to consider outsourcing these tasks. Dr. Kading remarks that most practices have a fairly good handle on the billing practices for insurance claims. But outsourcing billing and coding together can be helpful, because rather than waiting for an audit on an improperly coded chart, a coder will catch these errors during their normal flow, preventing major headaches down the line.

In this way, outsourcing your billing and coding can prevent insurance denials.

Dr. Kading points out that anything that can be done over the phone or on the internet can usually be outsourced. ”Some people with disabilities that prevent them from physically going into an office are amazing on the phone,” says Dr. Kading. Services like “National Recall” are staffed with people who are trained to maintain consistency and cover staff members who are out sick.

Another task that can be outsourced is order input. For example, opticians often help with frame selection, but it’s hard to then enter those jobs into the system and bill insurance. It’s easy to outsource someone to enter these jobs into the computer system remotely or during off-hours.

Not sure you trust an individual with these types of tasks? You don’t need to outsource to an individual. There are entire companies out there that cater to smaller practices, and ones that are specific to optometry. Williams Group is a consulting group, and they also do accounting or bookkeeping. A local bookkeeper could do the same, so it’s really your call what you prefer.

These companies have portals, says Dr. Kading. Employees can check the portals to see their PTO and sick time, as well as to see if they missed a clock-in or clock-out time. If you ever have an issue or question about HR hiring or firing, the company can address the questions and provide the right forms and guidance to ensure you come across as professional as possible during the entire process.

Two of the companies he recommends are Landrum HR and HR for Health.