Welcome to Optometry Simplified.
In this weekly newsletter, I've curated the best resources to help you grow personally and professionally.
My mission is to find what's best for my patients and my practice.
Here's what I've found...
Links I Liked
You can develop a CEO mindset
So many practice owners start with good intentions, but never slow down long enough to actually define where they’re going. A clear vision gives you something to say “yes” and “no” to. Without it, every decision feels reactive, and you end up managing chaos instead of leading people. I’m excited for parts 2 and 3 of this series from Nick Lillie, OD. Review of Optometric Business
Does hydrogen peroxide reduce the viral load on contact lenses?
It's cold and flu season, so remind your patients to rinse AND rub their lenses before storage. Melissa Barnett, OD, reviews the data regarding the different methods of contact lens cleaning and their performance against adenovirus. Contact Lens Spectrum
Research I'm Reading
Is it a nevus or melanoma?
OCT-Angiography is quickly moving from a “cool tech feature” to a clinically valuable tool, and this new paper highlights why. Researchers from the University of Essen utilized OCT-A to analyze vascular differences between choroidal melanomas and nevi, revealing that melanomas exhibit measurably lower vessel area and length density compared to benign nevi. Ophthalmology Science
Deep Thoughts
Most optometrists want to practice more medical optometry, but the truth is that many still equate “medical” with only acute care.
A red eye here, a sudden vision change there, a foreign body once in a while. These visits feel medical because they are urgent and obvious. But they are not the center of primary eye care.
The real heart of medical optometry is the day-in, day-out management of chronic disease. It is slower, less dramatic, and far more valuable to our patients over the course of their lives than the one-off problems we tend to think of as “medical.”
The challenge is that chronic care does not announce itself as clearly as acute care does. It requires a different mindset and a different way of measuring what matters. You cannot evaluate your medical model by counting conjunctivitis visits.
Instead, you evaluate it by asking a deeper question: Are we consistently recognizing, documenting, and managing chronic disease in a way that reflects the true complexity of primary eye care?
This is where G2211 becomes such an important tool. CMS created this code to capture the additional cognitive effort, time, and longitudinal decision-making that naturally occur when you are managing a patient with an ongoing medical condition.
For optometry, that is almost every patient with glaucoma, AMD, diabetic eye disease, dry eye, optic nerve anomalies, or even chronic binocular and functional problems that require continual evaluation.
In many ways, G2211 finally acknowledges the work primary care optometrists already do every single day.
This is why we, at Practice Performance Partners, recommend tracking G2211 per 992xx code as one of our core medical KPIs. It gives you a clear picture of whether your practice is truly functioning as a medical eye care clinic rather than a refractive first clinic that occasionally treats disease.
A low ratio does not mean your patients lack chronic disease. It usually means your documentation and coding do not yet reflect the level of complexity you are already managing.
Ultimately, G2211 is not about chasing reimbursement. It is about aligning your coding with the clinical reality of your work. It forces us to ask: Are we acknowledging the chronic medical complexity our patients bring to us every day?
Practices that get this right are not just billing better. They are thinking better, leading better, and providing more comprehensive care. That is the true engine of primary care optometry, and G2211 finally gives us a way to measure it.
Practice Performance Partners Pick
Are you getting denials when billing OCTA on the same day as a 92 code?
Don't miss this quick update from John Rumpakis, who breaks down the newest NCCI edits and what they mean for your day-to-day medical billing, so you can stay compliant and get paid for the care you’re actually delivering.
Can you do me a favor? If you found any of these resources helpful, share this newsletter with one of our colleagues!
See you next week!
--Kyle Klute, OD, FAAO