Determining appropriate professional fees has frequently been a challenge for private practice providers. Various methods have been employed to determine fees, e.g., "What are other folks charging?" (collusion?), "How much do I think my patients will pay?", "How much will insurance cover?", "What does Medicare allow?". Every method has drawbacks, and some can have serious fiscal consequences for a practice.

It makes very little sense to charge less than it costs the provider to provide the service. For a practice which is not fully booked, one can say any dollar generated by a formerly empty slot is better than no dollars at all. There is some validity to each argument. Following the processes available here, the practitioner can put him or herself in a better position to make decisions about fee schedules and alternative methods of dealing with less than full schedules.

This area of OPPI's website is dedicated to a private practice fee calculator which is novel in design. The calculator uses a micro-economic approach to calculate fees. It allows the optometrist to input variables for calculating the cost of the professional operation per unit time. It incorporates the cost of overhead attributable to providing professional services and the number of hours of potential patient contact time. This concept is referred to as "chair-time" cost. Other variables to be included in this calculation are the relative mix of payers for services (private, VSP Signature, VSP Value, VSP RNP, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) and a desired profit. Time must be allocated to each procedure or service. With this information the calculator will return proposed fees for each of the procedures. For the calculator to provide usable and accurate values, the practitioner do a reasonable amount of analysis in order to provide the input data needed to determine these fees.

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