Is It Ok To Profit From Specialty Contacts?

Profiting from Specialty Lenses

Specialty contact lenses such as custom soft lenses, gas permeable lenses, hybrid lenses, and scleral lenses can be life changing for patients. As rewarding as it is to help these patients, it is equally as important to ensure that your fees and reimbursement are healthy to generate a profit. Gasp – the P word?! Yes, it is very important that the services and products you offer in your office are profitable. If we wanted to give away eye care for free, we would volunteer at a free clinic or go on mission trips. We have to be realistic and understand that it is ok to be profitable with this type of service.

Extra Knowledge/Experience

The first thing to consider is the amount of extra time you invest learning how to fit specialty contact lenses. To manage specialty contact lenses effectively, usually extra training is needed. Attending workshops, viewing webinars, and learning about the ins and outs of these lenses is an investment of your time. Not every doctor wants to fit specialty contact lenses, in fact, most have no desire at all. You have taken an extra step to add an additional service to your clinic, and you must consider this when setting your fees.

Chair Time

Figure out how much time you are going to be spending with specialty contact lens patients. For example, you plan to take 2 hours for the fitting, 1 hour for the dispense, 1 hour for the training, and at least four follow ups at 30 minutes each. This results in a total of 6 hours of your precious chair time. Then, consider the amount of income generated by regular eye exams and glasses sales on days where you have zero specialty lens patients. For round numbers: let’s say that you see two eye exams per hour and you earn about $200 for each exam (assuming they purchase glasses or contacts or spent additional money above and beyond their comprehensive exam). So now you know that if you see two exams per hour at $200 each, that equals $400 per hour. This number needs to be considered when setting your fees for specialty lenses. At $400 per hour and 6 hours of chair time, you would need an income of about $2400 to generate the same amount of money. Your numbers will vary depending on your chair time, this is just an example to see how to figure out an appropriate fee.

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