As an optometrist you may find it easy to schedule your week around your preferences. You may close the office over lunch for an hour and a half and not open until nine o’clock in the morning. You may only schedule contact lens checks on Friday to insure you’ll make it home early to begin the weekend.
Maybe you are the optometrist that refers all potentially complicated acute care cases to the local ophthalmologist, or maybe you only schedule patients until three in the afternoon so that you can for sure lock up and go home at five. Whatever the case maybe, is it possible that your optometry office is difficult to do business with? Have you ever had patients stop by Wal-mart to get an adjustment because it was easy for them? Are you unknowingly losing patients over time?
Had I not had the privilege of working with buyers and sellers of optometry practices over the past couple of years, I would think that the above scenario would cause optometrists to rethink their approach to business. To my disbelief, there are numerous optometrists that live the above scenario and do not think it effects the way their practice operates.
- Communicate the way your patients prefer to be communicated with. It has become mainstream to communicate with patients through texting and email. Patients appreciate an optometry practice that alerts them by text that their eyeglasses or contact lenses are ready to be picked up. It does not become obvious that this is the case until your practice utilizes the software to make this happen.
- Have great hours where patients can stop by your place when they are not at work. If you want to have professionals as patients then you will need to have evening and weekend hours. If you want to have a growing practice of young families then your hours of business must be conducive to their schedules.
- Allow patients and referring doctors to schedule appointments with you anytime. This means that you utilize some form of online appointment requests or patient scheduling. Did you know that referral center offices, like your cataract surgeon, love the ability to schedule the post-op care with you at any time of the day. This is easy to use and easy to control your schedule through the right software technology.
