Sean Hanlon is the CEO at CoFi Inc., provider of an innovative, multi-provider payment platform for eye-care practices and surgery centers.
Ophthalmology Management: How does the CoFi platform simplify the payment process for practices and their patients?
Sean Hanlon: It can be frustrating and confusing for patients who elect to get premium IOLs, or all-cash procedures like refractive lens exchange or LASIK to have to pay multiple providers at different times. They often have to pay the surgeon for their premium fee, the ASC for the lenses and then the optometrist for postoperative services.We thought, why should the patient have to make different payments at different points in time to each party involved in the procedure? Why can’t it be more clear and efficient like paying for a flight, car rental and hotel all at once? With CoFi, the patient has one payment event, where they use one card or one check or one financing transaction at the surgical practice, and, through our software, each provider charges the patient in separate and distinct transactions.
This system not only simplifies the payment process for the patient, but also facilitates payment separation, which is essential from a compliance perspective. CoFi saves the surgical coordinator in the practice time in explaining the cost, the entities involved, who the patient needs to pay, etc. With CoFi, setting up an invoice and processing a payment only takes practice staff a minute or less and simplifies the discussion around payment. The result is less patient confusion and reduced administrative friction than would typically occur during this process.
OM: Can you tell us about the services CoFi provides?
SH: The first thing we provide is a simple-to-use, multi-provider payment tool, where patients can separately but conveniently pay the surgeon and the surgery center, or the surgeon and a co-managing optometrist, or all three at once. They can even add anesthesia as a fourth provider.
Second, we make handling these payments more compliant since one provider should never be collecting for and paying another provider — especially when there’s a referral relationship. So, we’re helping to “de-risk” everyone from a compliance perspective by making it really easy for the patient to pay all of the parties involved, in one payment “event” — while ensuring that the amounts reflect each provider’s fair market value for their services.
Finally, we have a terrific team that works closely with our ophthalmology practice customers to get them onboarded to CoFi. And, critically, we have a proven, successful system for engaging and onboarding their partners — ASCs, anesthesia providers and optometry practices. An ophthalmology practice might collaborate with five, 50 or 500 co-managing optometrists, and we’re adept at getting all of them onto CoFi. Well over 5,000 optometrists are on our platform today.
OM: CoFi announced availability of its financing solution with CareCredit. Can you tell us more?
SH: We are really excited about our integration with CareCredit, which allows patients to consolidate the fees from multiple providers into a single financing transaction with a CareCredit card. When patients are contemplating a premium procedure, they often want to finance the entire cost of a procedure; they don’t just want to be able to finance the surgeon’s fees but then have to come up with separate funds to pay the optometrist or the surgery center.
Prior to this integration, it was impossible to get everybody to participate in the same loan. Not every ASC or optometry practice even offers financing, and if they do, they may not offer CareCredit or may offer different plans than the surgeon. We’ve enabled the patient to have one financing event through the surgeon’s office — one loan involving all of the participating parties fees. Funds are distributed compliantly, and there is no requirement that the surgical partners are enrolled with CareCredit, only that they have a CoFi account. Our customers are pleased we’ve brought this innovation to market.
OM: What should MDs and their staff know about adding CoFi?
SH: With over 6,000 eye-care providers now using CoFi, our goal is to make implementing the CoFi platform as easy as possible for surgical practices and their partners. Our team will organize each account, train the staff how to use the product, and recruit and onboard ODs and surgical partners. We often hear from our customers how seamless our onboarding is and how efficient CoFi is for both staff and patients. Our goal is to help improve the patient payment experience, enhance compliance, and increase efficiency for practices and their surgical partners! OM
