By Dave Anderson, OD
Okay, time for owner-doctors to look away again. This article isn’t for you. Well, if you’re an owner-doctor, I suppose you can read it, but please know this story is for associate doctors. As I mentioned in a previous article, associates currently and by far outnumber owner-doctors in optometric practices.1,2
Now, turning to associates: Many of you have a strong drive and desire to better the practice in which you work. Whether your passion is staff training and education, growing a niche or adding services, you, associates, have great ideas!
So how do associates turn your great idea into an action plan if you want to grow a niche within your practice?
Associates, especially those of you who are recent optometry school graduates, often enter the workforce with strong preferences on the type of patients you want to see.
As an advanced practice extern preceptor for The Ohio State College of Optometry, students are constantly telling me that they want to focus on certain aspects of eyecare, and not necessarily all aspects of eyecare. Some students want to specialize in pediatric patients and vision therapy. Some want to concentrate on ocular disease. Yet other students tell me that they enjoy the challenges of specialty contact lenses and sclerals.
What this says to me is that all of you associate doctors could potentially bring a new aspect of care to your practice or enhance and improve existing services.
How Can Associates Add a Niche to an Optometric Practice?
You have the great idea, but where should you start? It may seem daunting to add a new specialty into other patient services that your practice already provides. But if you start with some very simple steps, the task is quite easy.
- Clearly define your objective so it can be communicated to the owners, staff, and of course, your patients.
- Once your objective is defined, evaluate the current status of the potential new service. To achieve this, evaluate your patient base to measure the appetite for what you are proposing. For example, if your practice has less than 5% of patients under the age of 14, adding a new pediatric focus may be challenging. However, this scenario may provide an amazing opportunity to grow the practice with new patients.
- Develop a cost analysis and implementation plan for the new service. Some costs may be very low, while some may be extensive. When considering costs, think about all the diagnostics and other tools needed. Then divide them into a “must have” list and a “nice to have” list. This can help you stage your implementation in phases and add the items on the “nice to have” list as your service grows.
- Define your marketing audience and develop a plan. Once you know if your marketing needs to focus on bringing in new patients or center on your existing patients, you can develop your marketing plan.
- Add staff training to your implementation plan. I always recommend having a champion staff member to work alongside of you. This helps ensure the staff has a go-to person and someone to ultimately hold everyone accountable.
Put Your Plan into Action
Recently, an associate came to me requesting an opportunity to meet so we could discuss her desire to add a dry eye clinic to her office. A week later, I was blown away by the presentation which included her objective and why she felt dry eye was a key undertreated area of her office; a timeline; costs; average patient revenue; and an implementation and training plan for staff.
Additionally, her plan’s outreach centered on internal marketing and inter-office referrals from other doctors who don’t treat dry eye. The associate also found the codes for dry eye and meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD) in over 25% of patients already in the system, yet only 2 had been treated with an in-office MGD treatment in the last 8 months.
Her total cost to undertake this conversion was less than $1,000, which covered only a few diagnostics, with the rest representing sellable or billable items. The marketing was done internally through our current recall system and in-office signs, which cost less than $100.
She is off and running with her new dry eye clinic. The associate already signed up 9 patients for MGD treatment in the first 3 weeks, and our sellable products have increased by 500% in the last month.
Your Take-home Action Plan
If you really want to add a niche to your practice or focus on serving a new patient base, start planning now. Do the research on capacity, cost, and investment return. The rest can fall into place.
Dr. Dave Anderson practices at Miamisburg Vision Care in Ohio. He is a 2004 graduate of The Ohio State University College of Optometry. He is a past president of the Ohio Optometric Association (OOA) and continues to serve on many committees at the state and national levels. He is currently a preceptor for an Advanced Practice Extern site for OSU College of Optometry and has been an investigator in clinical trials for contact lenses and ocular pharmaceuticals.
