Eyeworld

OPHTHALMOLOGY BUSINESS 90 February 2016 by William B. Rabourn Jr. • More than a few LASIK surgeons are reluctant to offer or effective- ly promote a healthcare credit card option because of a personal negative attitude toward the use of credit ("I don't want to get my pa- tients into debt"), yet they accept VISA and MasterCard and don't appreciate the irony. Why this tactic makes little sense: With a healthcare credit card, the patient could have opted for a deferred interest financing plan, but instead will be paying VISA or MasterCard interest for many months to come, and the fee for LASIK may tie up the VISA credit line they need for other ex- penses that come up. How many patients will realize this and wisely seek more favorable financing from another provider who offers it? Even one would be too many. • Some surgeons go as far as to pull out a calculator to show patients how much they should go home and save each month until they have enough to pay cash for LASIK. They wonder why these pa- tients don't come back later with those savings to schedule their procedure. Why patients see this "self-fi- nancing" route as impractical: Even with a patient's best inten- tions to save, unexpected and higher-priority expenses have a way of emerging a few days before payday, and vision correction will be pushed another month into the future, again. These patients could have been enjoying the vision they wanted and improved quality of life while making bud- get-friendly payments, perhaps with deferred interest. This type of situation steers LASIK candi- dates away from their first-choice surgeon to schedule an appoint- ment with a practice that offers an attractive credit product. This tactic also ignores a basic eco- nomic principle—the time value of money to both the patient and the practice. • There's the concern that offering a credit product costs the surgeon too much because the practice is charged "interest" on money that the patient is borrowing. Why this isn't actually a valid concern: Let's clear up a common as the two factors that would most influence their decision to have the procedure. Nearly half (46%) re- sponded that they would use special financing options, such as deferred interest promotions, and in a Florida market, 61% indicated that they would take that route. For many, the availability of an attractive financing option becomes an access-to-care issue. Clearly, the availability of attrac- tive financing drives a significant portion of the LASIK market, so why do so many practices downplay its availability, offering it only selec- tively (declining to offer promotions that feature deferred interest when paid in full on time) or not at all? • I have seen practices that don't lead with a financing offer, wait- ing to see if they need to intro- duce it later as a deal-saver. Why this tactic is counterpro- ductive: These practices will never know how many "deals" quietly walked away because they consid- ered the lack of an attractive credit product a "non-negotiable." away business, yet that is what hap- pens when consumers are not given appropriate payment options or the information they need to access them. As a consultant in this indus- try for more than 25 years, it's my business to keep abreast of factors that move the market for elective procedures (LASIK) and products (premium lenses, for example) and to seek out the reasons why patients elect—or don't elect—to purchase what they clearly want. I know that a typical LASIK patient's path to vision is lengthy—in excess of 120 days, on average. Almost half of pa- tients who have had LASIK indicate that vision surgery was an absolute necessity, yet many had to delay their procedure because of cost. In a survey I conducted in 2015, slightly more than half of patients who did not already have a healthcare credit card (CareCredit, for example) said they would consider financing if it enabled them to get surgery imme- diately. In a Texas market, 66% of potential LASIK patients cited cost and affordable payment options W ho are the people that visit your website to learn about their vision correction op- tions, that visit your office for a LASIK consultation and your professional opinion? First and foremost, they are your PATIENTS. You provide all the information they need to make de- cisions that will impact their health; it's a professional responsibility that you take seriously. Once you have evaluated and qualified a candidate, however, the final call is in their hands—their vision, their decision. Those patients are also CONSUMERS who are evaluating a purchase decision that will affect their finances. They need infor- mation about all of their payment options, but many practices do not address that need effectively; pa- tients may be hearing a mixed mes- sage about an important option that broadens access to care—a health- care credit card/line of credit. As the owner of a professional practice, a surgeon is also a BUSINESS person who cannot afford to routinely turn It's their vision, it's their decision

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