CooperVision kicked off the Best Practices webinar series, "Best Practices to Get You Back to Practice" on May 28th at 8 pm. The topic for the first webinar was "Making Schedule Changes an Integral Part of Reopening". The webinar featured Best Practices honorees Elizabeth Muckley, OD, FAAO of Northeast Ohio Eye Surgeons (2019) and Carrie Alfieri, OD of Pinnacle Eye Associates (2018). Additionally, Patrick Thoben and Scott Wiesenfeld of CooperVision's Eyecare Prime division shared use cases related to the Prime Nexus patient management platform. Jennifer Palombi, OD, FAAO, Senior Manager of Professional Education and Development for CooperVision, hosted and moderated the conversation.
Drs. Muckley and Alfieri shared their top tips related to scheduling as practices reopen:
Collect and input information on behalf of your patients.
When the patient calls from your parking lot to let you know they arrived, have staff take the chief complaint, HPI, medication updates, allergies, and family history over the phone and enter it into the record from the car. This keeps rooms available for testing and helps move patients through quicker.
Off-set the schedule among your doctors.
If you have multiple doctors in your practice, off-set the scheduling of patients. For example, Doctor A sees patients every 20 minutes at 8:00am, 8:20am and 8:40am while Doctor B sees patients every 20 minutes at 7:50am, 8:10am and 8:30am. This staggers the patients for social distancing and supports room turnover.
Extend your day.
Add 2 additional appointment times at the beginning and end of the day to help maintain volume. If you see patients at 8:00am - 4:30pm, then start at 7:40am and end your last patient at 4:30pm. Take only a 20-minute lunch and see someone over that time as well. You’ll slightly increase your workday and can stagger staff so as not to incur overtime.
Over communicate with both staff and patients.
Ensure both staff and patients know what your protocols are for sanitizing and what your requirements are for patients to be seen. It saves time and potential missed appointment slots if you ensure your patient knows they are supposed to wear a mask prior to arrival and who you will allow/not allow to accompany them to their appointment.
A pdf of these tips can be downloaded here:
Additional information related to Eyecare Prime's suite of products can be accessed and downloaded here:
Tune in tonight for the second webinar in the series, "Bringing Patients Back to Your Office Utilizing Technology" featuring Best Practicees honorees Bridgitte Shen Lee, OD, FAAO, FBCLA and Jennifer Stewart, OD.
The full lineup of topics, dates and registration pages can be found HERE.
