Customer Testimonial: The Eye Centers of Racine & Kenosha

We interviewed Krishna Sanka, M.D., LASIK & cataract surgeon and owner at The Eye Centers of Racine & Kenosha, to gain his perspective on using CoFi. Their surgeons perform procedures at their in-office surgery suite and an external ASC, and they maintain a network of independent co-managing optometrists.

They chose CoFi to eliminate patient frustration and confusion around having to make separate payments at different points in time and to reduce the amount of time their staff spent explaining each payment. “I would tell any administrator or surgeon that CoFi is a no-brainer. It makes everything smoother and easier for your patients, for the optometrists you co-manage with, for any surgery center you work with, and for you.”

1. What would you say when recommending CoFi to a colleague?

I would tell any administrator or surgeon that CoFi is a nobrainer. We strive to optimize the patient care experience while we enhance and preserve patients' vision. And CoFi is an essential part of that. It makes everything smoother and easier for your patients, for the optometrists you comanage with, for any surgery center you work with, and for you. It is a situation where everybody wins.

2. Have any patients responded now that you use CoFi?

From the patient’s standpoint, if there is no news, that is excellent news. We had many complaints from patients under the old way. They’d ask us, “What do you mean I must pay the optometrist how much? And you need me to use my credit card or write a check for you too? And then on the day of my surgery, I'd have to pay the surgery center?” Before CoFi, we often received negative feedback related to this issue from patients. We had to apologize and move on as best we could. We don’t worry about that anymore with CoFi because there’s been a sharp drop in negative feedback, which is a huge positive.

3. How did you handle co-management payments before using CoFi?

We knew that, from a compliance perspective, we didn’t want to be collecting the ODs’ fees and writing them checks. So, we did what many practices were doing to ensure compliance. If we were co-managing with an optometrist, and especially if the patient elected for a premium IOL, our practice would collect the amount owed to us. Then, separately, the optometrist would collect the fees owed to them by the patient. At the time, this was the “best” compliant option available. But this was suboptimal because it could be confusing to our patients, was an administrative burden on our staff to explain when & where to pay each fee, and often created an uncomfortable situation for the OD when collecting payment from the patient. (The same is true for the ASC, by the way.) It was not the smoothest, most convenient process.

4. When doing procedures at the external ASC, the patient must make a separate payment to that facility. So, in some cases, your patients might have to pay three parties. What were some of those pain points?

Typically, the patient would make that payment to the surgery center on the day of surgery itself. You can imagine how confusing this could be for the patient to keep track of it, to keep documentation that’s proper about it. It’s a mess and something that our patients found quite onerous.

5. How has your practice changed now that you use CoFi?

In a compliant fashion, the patient can have their card run once at our office and simultaneously and separately pay us, the optometrist, and the surgery center. The patient gets a single invoice that documents everything they’ve paid and sees those separate charges on their card or bank statement. I can’t say enough just how much smoother and easier this process is for everyone.

6. What attracted you to the product?

We were very excited to start using CoFi because it would make our processes simpler, smoother, and more efficient and allow us to devote more time to patient care and counseling. As important, CoFi provided us with a better option to maintain compliance and to improve our process for co-management and ASC payments. We also saw the potential for us to make everything easier for optometrists. CoFi’s solution addressed what we often heard from them: that collecting their co-management fee at the post-op visit was uncomfortable for them and potentially confusing for the patients. These were enormous draws for us when we learned about CoFi.

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