Hi everyone Adam from The Eye Place here, back with a new topic for your viewing pleasure.
So, I think one of the most commonly asked questions for most medical practitioners is
do you bulk bill? which is completely understandable given that we all want to know how much it's
going to cost.
So then let's get clear about what bulk billing means, medical practitioners have the choice
to either bulk bill or charge a consultation fee, so bulk billing is where the practitioner
is being paid by the government schedule fee and the patient has no out-of-pocket expense.
Whereas a consultation fee is where the practitioner sets the fee that the patient pays directly
to the practitioner and then the government reimburses the patient a scheduled fee for
the service that they’ve had.
So why would a practitioner choose to charge a consultation fee?
well it's all got to do with the government schedule fee rate, which is the amount that
they are willing to pay for a service that you're providing, more often or not, that
rate is just not feasible for the quality of service that the practitioner wants to
provide for their patients, a consultation fee then allows the practitioner to set their
own fees for the services that they are providing.
When Anna and I set up The Eye Place, we spend a lot of time figuring out whether we're going
to bulk bill or charge for a consultation fee, we concluded that to give our patients
the best possible care and experience, the consultation fee model was the way to go,
and it worked well.
To the main benefits of consultation fee model, that we can spend more time with each individual
patient and the quality of the eye examination that I can provide as I'm able to spend up
to 45 minutes with each patient, this amount of time allows me to perform a full exam of
your eye health, your prescription needs as well as performing retinal photos and scans
that can be compared to previous ones that you've had and then stored for future reference.
We consistently receive feedback on how thorough the eye examinations are and how well things
were explained during the eye examination, and this is the experience that we want each
and every patient of ours to have at The Eye Place.
The bulk billing model simply would not allow this experience for each of our patients.
Currently, these amounts are frozen until at least 2020, the government will pay a schedule
fee of fifty-six or twenty-six dollars for a full examination of your eyes which all
depends upon when you last had your eyes examined, and if you are under or over 65 years of age.
As you can appreciate that these rates make it impossible to provide the same quality
of examination under the bulk billing model, we would need to at least half their consultation
times as well as cut out many of the tests we do that is considered standard for each
and every patient that is examined at The Eye Place.
Many practitioners choose to bulk bill, with 15 to 20 minutes’ appointment times, but
this is not the experience I would like to have and it’s definitely not the experience
I would like to give you here at The Eye Place.
So, I hope this gives you a better understanding of bulk billing vs consultation fees, there’s
a lot of information available on this topic and some interesting data on how the schedule
fees of the Medicare rebate and just not kept in mind with the average and increasing cost
of running a business.
I've included some articles and websites in the links below that I feel really explain
and will help you to understand this topic maybe even better than how I explained it
to you today, so if you could please leave any comments or thoughts in the comment section
below and I'll be sure to get back to you, and thanks very much for your time and thanks
for watching this video hope to see you soon at The Eye Place