We recently interviewed Guido Piquet, Chief Operations Officer at Mann Eye Institute to gain his perspective on using CoFi.

Mann Eye, a CoFi customer since September 2021, cares for patients at their 18 locations in Houston and Austin, and works with a large and growing number of optometrists in their markets. This expanding practice chose CoFi to ensure compliance around co-management payments, and to make patient payments to multiple providers more efficient for patients and the Mann Eye staff.

CoFi alleviates significant pain points for patients, ODs, and the Mann Eye staff. “Our team was working on growing our co-management network. We knew that we would have everything done in a way that screams “compliant.” CoFi fit into our strategic plan for co-management growth because the product facilitates separate payments to our practice and the OD’s practices in a way that’s convenient for the patient.”

1. If you were talking to another practice administrator or surgeon who was thinking about using CoFi, what would you tell them?

I have two things to recommend to another practice. The first is about growth. If you’re growing your practice, what works now may not work in the future. You need to look for ways to be more efficient in terms of payments. The other side is around compliance. You’ll have more eyes on you as your practice grows. It’s better to separate payments to your practice and co-managing optometrists to remove any doubt about paying for referrals. I highly recommend CoFi for both these areas.

2. How did you handle co-management payments prior to using CoFi?

Well, it wasn’t a fun process. We worked with some comanaging partners that preferred to collect their fees independently without us involved. However, that was the exception. Most co-managing partners wanted us to collect their portion of the fee for them. As a practice, we reluctantly started collecting on behalf of the OD for elective LASIK surgery only. For these surgeries, we created an internal process to document when and why we’d collect the fees on behalf of our co-managing ODs to ensure we were as compliant as possible.

3. What were some of the pain points from your perspective?

The process we established was cumbersome. Our staff would create an invoice that was very clear on how much we were collecting for each party, a manager would sign off on it, and then our accounting department would write a check to the OD. The whole process might take a few weeks. Sometimes, the ODs would call us asking us “where’s our check?” This made us look bad to the OD, and the process had several places where something could go wrong.

4. What attracted you to the product?

Our team was working on growing our co-management network. We knew that we would have everything done in a way that screams “compliant.” CoFi fit into our strategic plan for co-management growth because the product facilitates separate payments to our practice and the OD’s practice in a way that’s convenient for the patient.

5. What were you concerned about with respect to getting started with CoFi?

And how did that turn out? Our biggest concern with CoFi was how our OD network would receive it. We strive to provide a concierge service for our patients and referring practices to make it as easy as possible for everyone. This was going to be different for the ODs. We received little pushback and a very positive response from our referring practices. We worked with CoFi to develop a strategic onboarding plan. We explained the benefits of CoFi – faster payment, notifications of patient transactions, better transparency. CoFi would talk to these practices to get them set up on the software. It’s been very successful – nearly 150 optometrists are on CoFi with us.

6. How would you describe processing comanagement fees now that you use CoFi?

Now, we’re much more efficient. Our team creates an invoice in CoFi including our fees and the OD’s fees so it’s ready for surgery day. When the patient goes to pay it’s just like you would checkout of any other web transaction with a cart. We simply login to CoFi to process the invoice and the patient pays each party separately.

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