Four weeks ago I went back to full service care in my office and, well, I’ve learned a few things in the last month. Sharing is caring, so here is the rundown of what has worked and what we are still working on tweaking.

What We Are Still Tweaking

• Our schedule continues to change. We started the first week back with one patient per hour but found over the first two weeks that we could handle more and increased to around one every 30 minutes. But here is the thing… my revenue didn’t increase when I added more patients. That got me thinking… does seeing fewer patients in a day but giving them the full service treatment yield the same in revenue? That is what I am going to be testing. I know every doctor is different but I prefer high-touch and being super involved which is hard to do with more patients… so I will be testing a couple different schedules in the next few weeks to see what works best, feels best to me and my team and creates the revenue and profit we want.
• We are also still working on figuring out new contact lens fitting and training. At first I planned on not doing any new wearers for awhile but have found that just might not be manageable. My new procedure is to have new wearers watch a training video and then practice on their own in the office, sending them home with lenses when they are able to remove them successfully, inserting them myself as needed. We have done this a few times and so far it has worked ok, I’m staying open to making changes as we need to in the process though.

What’s Working

• Online intake forms are working great for us and we will NEVER go back to paper forms again. Why do we love them? Oh so many reasons. The biggest reason is the time savings we are experiencing by patients having their forms completed before their appointment. I am not exaggerating by say that it saves AT LEAST ten minutes with a new patient. If you haven’t done this yet… DO IT! Like, do it yesterday.
• Although the amount of disinfection we are doing is obscene we do like the HOCl cleanser we chose. Originally we used Pure & Clean (which was great) but I ordered a system for creating out our HOCl last week and can’t wait to try it out. It is much more cost effective than ordering the gallons that we need each month. The system I bought is Force of Nature and I’ll update you when I get a chance to try it.
• We’ve landed on using the telemedicine platform integrated into IntakeQ for remote visits and feel like it is working well. I’ve started seeing less urgent red eyes this way as well as doing follow up checks on those seen in office when possible. I am also in the process of implementing remote vision therapy and a remote reading/learning program.

There you have it, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned and what we are working on changing. The most important thing we have learned is to stay flexible. Practice doesn’t look like it did… but that isn’t a bad thing. I am focused on making things work BETTER than they did pre-closure and that is the best thing to come from the last few months for sure!

What have you learned that is working and what are you still figuring out?