Alternative Bundled Plans
For several years, practices have traditionally offered bundled pricing that includes services and supplies because it provides the most comprehensive service for patients. Due to market conditions, many practices now offer an alternative bundled option with reduced supplies and services in addition to their other treatment plans to remain competitive with big box retailers and third-party administrators (TPA).
Two primary reasons for including alternative bundled plans:
- Competitive Market Entry: Offering patients a lower-cost option to compete against big-box retailers.
- Service Utilization: Providing an alternative payment option that allows the patient to pay as they go for the services as they utilize them.
If your practice works with TPA contracts, each one has different requirements. Our team will work with you to review these contracts and help you build hearing aid service plans that provide high-quality patient care with profit margins that won’t threaten the long-term health of your business.
Fuel Medical’s Access Hearing program provides an additional way for practices to offer bundled services at an affordable rate. With Access Hearing, patients can receive a full line of high-quality, private-label product offerings along with robust service package options.
How Fuel Helps: Our experts will partner with you to review any existing TPA plans and assist you in creating an alternative bundled treatment plan that meets patients’ communication and budgetary needs while ensuring practice profitability.
Treatment Packages
It’s important to price a plan that falls within a reasonable range between the out-of-pocket expense of a third-party hearing aid benefits plan and a private pay plan. Every patient’s budget is different, and having a variety of packages means you can effectively serve a bigger range of patients.
Building a Competitive Treatment Plan
Since the price gap often makes it difficult to offer your private pay plan as an alternative to a TPA benefit or retail option, clinics can remain competitive by creating a secondary bundled treatment plan that offers similar services and technology.
Fuel Medical’s Access Hearing plan is designed to provide the previous generation of top-of-the-line hearing aid options paired with ongoing services that match or exceed that of a TPA.
Use Cases
- Better serve patients who may not otherwise receive the robust offerings of the medical model of hearing loss treatment
- Offer patients a full line of high-quality, private-label product offerings
- Offer patients robust service package options
- Allow practices to provide extended service contracts
How Fuel Helps: Our team will help you create a service plan that delivers a favorable margin for your practice by capitalizing on the annual services you offer that aren’t covered by a typical TPA. Additionally, we’ll help every member of your practice learn how to explain these package benefits in a way that resonates with patients while providing customized assets that make it even easier.
Develop Service Contracts
Your updated service contract should list the services provided in the plan for the bundled fee. The patient should receive an appropriate document with the listed services and a clear timeline for the service offering. To make sure your patients receive the highest level of service, it’s important to develop the right program and the right materials.
Use Cases:
- Provide transparent services to managed care patients
- Bring patients who are interested in big-box offerings into your practice
- Engage patients who may be interested in OTC products
How Fuel Helps: Your regional manager can walk you through Fuel’s Service Plan Calculator and Revenue Per Clinical Hour Calculator to determine your clinical break-even point and help you establish the most effective plan for your practice.
Update Your Superbill
Your practice’s superbill provides transparency for patients and is an essential part of insurance compliance. It should list every coded and non-coded service and be updated regularly as coding conventions change, which ensures insurance and private-pay patients are charged the same amount.
How Fuel Helps: Your regional manager can provide you with an example and support as you assess and revise your superbill.
KPIs
Numbers tell a story. It helps if practices are curious so we can show them how they compare to other practices. But, more importantly, practices can compare their performance with their own historical data from the year before. Did they have losses or make gains? Why? It’s the ‘why’ that helps them build realistic goals for the next year.
Adria Pazour,
Regional Manager
It’s important for healthcare businesses to remain profitable so they can continue serving patients. Tracking KPIs, or key performance indicators, will allow you to determine what is and isn’t working so you can continue to grow your practice and see more patients. If you’re not using your practice’s KPIs to inform your actions, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities. Considering the factual data and how it measures against benchmarks from similarly sized practices and removing the emotional aspect of running a practice is invaluable for moving forward with intention.
Use Cases
- Determine what your practice is doing well
- Determine areas for improvement and growth
- Determine how improvements can impact your practice’s profitability and/or efficiency
In the ENT and audiology spaces, useful KPIs to track include conversion rates, return rates and average sale price of hearing aids. You can read more at our ENT and audiology case studies.
How Fuel Helps: We’ll help you determine which KPI data should be collected, review them throughout the year, analyze areas of strengths and weaknesses and recommend improvement plans to keep your practice running smoothly and profitably.
Audiology Training
For many audiologists, discussions with patients can become difficult when finances enter the conversation. Cost often plays a key role for a patient, and how to talk about the benefit of a specific tier of products versus their cost to the consumer can be a foreign one.
Enter the Conversation with Confidence
We provide many systems that can help audiologists to have these conversations in a way that aligns with their value systems and helps the patient to understand how that technology and the audiologist’s experience and expertise will impact their treatment in a realistic way.
Use Cases
We provide audiological training courses and have on-site specialists who can help audiologists understand how to communicate their value to patients.
How Fuel Helps: We’ll make sure your audiologists understand the consumer psychology of the patient sitting across from us so that we can help build the foundation of excellence and the best medical processes.