Surgeons and their teams work hard to create an exceptional experience for their patients—one that begins the moment a patient schedules a consultation and extends all the way through the stages of the comprehensive patient experience to post-operative care. For premium lens patients, despite all that effort, the final step—the payment process—can tarnish an otherwise exceptional journey.

Patients undergoing premium procedures are required—for compliance purposes—to make multiple high-dollar payments to different providers at different times. This fragmented payment experience can leave patients feeling frustrated and confused, diminishing the positive impression the practice worked so hard to create.

See the top of this page for a visual of the premium IOL patient’s payment “journey” our founder, Sean Hanlon, presented as part of his talk at the AECOS Winter Meeting in Aspen, February, 2025.

Let’s break this down and why it matters:

Compliance Forces Patients to Pay Providers Separately

Compliance regulations require that patients pay each provider or party involved in a procedure directly. For instance, a surgeon should not collect globally and distribute funds to other providers—especially when there’s a referral relationship (which is almost always the case).

This means that, in multi-party procedures, patients often face multiple, disjointed payment events.

Multiple High-Dollar Payments Create Confusion and Burden

As the slide above depicts, for premium / elective procedures, patients often have to make 4 payments, and if a co-managing optometrist is involved, 5!

This fragmented payment process can be confusing and off-putting for the patient. It’s also an administrative burden for everyone involved.

Poor Payment Experiences Can Tarnish an Otherwise Excellent Care Journey

As Mann Eye Institute’s Guido Piquet put it in a recent podcast interview, the patient’s “payment journey” plays a big role in their satisfaction and willingness to refer, and it’s often the last interaction they have with your practice.

CoFi solves this by enabling the patient to pay each party separately – but at one convenient time.

CoFi brings all the parties together, allowing ophthalmology practices to provide patients with a single, convenient payment event while ensuring each provider is paid separately and compliantly.

Today, over 15,000 eye care providers are using CoFi to simplify the payment experience for their patients. For premium procedures, all costs—surgeon fees, ASC fees for lenses, and OD post-operative fees—are known and provided to the patient upfront.

Why should patients endure multiple payment events when they could experience a payment process as easy as booking a flight, hotel, and rental car all at once?

With CoFi, practices can ensure that patients leave with a positive impression—one that reflects the excellence of the care they received.

Ready to simplify payments and elevate your patient experience?