Most businesses know what it costs them to provide a good or a service — and so should you in your ophthalmology practice.

According to Robert B. Connelly and Mark E. Kropiewnicki, J.D., LL.M., health care consultants with the Health Care Group in Plymouth Meeting Pa., once you determine how much it costs your practice to render each service you offer, you can apply good management principles to improve cost effectiveness.

For example, consider the per-use cost of obtaining a photo of a retina. Whether it costs your practice $15 or $45 to perform this service will give you a feel for when to use this particular technology. If your practice is heavily capitated, it may be cost effective to use the original photo whenever possible, as opposed to taking new ones when no change in the patient’s condition is evident.

Another way you can improve cost effectiveness is to make sure that every task is performed by the lowest paid member of your practice who is both capable and qualified of doing the task. This strategy is employed throughout ophthalmology.

It doesn’t make sense, for example, to have a general ophthalmologist earning $225,000 a year performing visual fields or refractions. The ophthalmic assistant, who is earning $25,000 a year is perfectly capable of doing this work. Why pay 10 times more?