Just makes me wonder how we would start billing for this!!!!
"Digitally Active Contact Lenses – Are We Near It's hard to trace the active contact lens' birth date, but the year might be 1973. , researchers at the National Environmental Research Center created a contact lens with a thermocouple built in. The sensor-cum-contact was arguably the first digitally active design to be realized. As the electronics revolution commenced in the 1970s and 1980s, though, little work was done to expand on this precocious design. Interest revived in the late 1990s, but it was not until 2001 that the device began to step from concept into commercial reality. Researchers used micro-electro-mechanic sensors (MEMS) to create a contact lens that monitored ocular pressure -- an important indicator of Glaucoma. The research was presented at the New Directions in Cellular and Tissue Biomechanics conference in Les Diablerets, Switzerland. In 2009, a company Sensimed AG launched the world's first commercial digitally active contact lens. The design, dubbed "Triggerfish", used an embedded a MEMS strain gauge sensor and microprocessor inside a soft silicone contact lens. The circuit elements were exocentric, out of the line of sight. The device received power from and ferried signals via a circular antenna around the eye socket. In the last decade several devising and even more ambitious designs were introduced in this hot field. Among the most noteworthy is Professor Babak Parviz of Seattle's Washington University, who added pixel displays to the mix. Perhaps inspired by Triggerfish - medical sensors, such as a glucose sensor (monitoring tear glucose, an indicator of blood sugar in diabetics), are also inculcated into the design. But creating a contact lens display has been a major obstacle for focusing the image. In short, we need miniature lenses to focus the image on the eye. Ultimately the digitally active contact lens of the future aims to be a high resolution display, which can assert an augmented reality, including text and images over human vision. Such a design would work for business (work displayed right in your eyes), communications (text messages, emails), and pleasure (imagine watching movies or "tripping" without drugs via in-eye vision). The lens will also likely optionally incorporate glucose, occular pressure, and possibly other sensors to monitor eye health and overall body health. , it may be a few decades before the perfected contact lens product is released commercially, but in just 10 years we may have crude commercial contact lens text displays, if you're willing to wearing a bulky wireless power device around your eye socket." (full article here)
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opticXpress is an optometric billing company that provides a clearinghouse, billing service and software strictly for optometrists.
Friday, February 24, 2012
OpticXpress Handles Optometrists’ Billing
From Elaine Rose at "Press Of Atlantic City"
Full Article Here
Full Article Here
OpticXpress provides medical billing services and office software for optometrists. We give them the software to help comply with records requirements and to connect with patients as part of doing the billing.
We have multiple clients nationwide that use our service and our software.
I work with companies in Vineland for developing software, creativity and for printing forms. I try to work with local companies when practical.
Optometry is an underserved specialty in the medical billing world. There are a lot of nuances in the codes that most generic medical billers are not familiar with.
Entry: Until the early 1990s, optometrists weren't considered to be providing medical services, and dealt with vision insurance. But then the government opened the opportunity for them to provide medical services, which are covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
We were able to capitalize on the change, and could educate doctors. We post a lot of information we get from our community and various articles[ to our blog ] as a resource to help in their practice.
We specialize in post-operative cataract billing. It's an issue that's very hot among optometrists. A lot of them have patients who go to ophthalmologists for the surgery, and then come to optometrists for after care. We can virtually guarantee that an optometrist will get paid for those services.
The average optometrist's practice is small, about $500,000 to [$1.5] million a year in revenue. The biggest challenge is to educate practitioners that it's better to outsource their billing, so they don't have to do it anymore. They often can't afford to hire a billing department, so they rely on untrained staff to bill patients and deal with insurance companies.
The future: We want to become synonymous with optometric medical billing nationwide. We want optometrists seeking to take their practice to the next level to think of OpticXpress.
Staff writer Elaine Rose
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