Maximizing Chair Time This Fall

I am the founding partner and medical director of Line of Sight, a private-practice vision care company specializing in dry eye and contact lens wear, that was established in Hudson Yards, New York City, in 2020. We have three full-time optometrists on our staff. We each see 18-20 patients in a typical day, most of whom are corporate professionals in their mid-20s to mid-40s. Many of these patients present for a mixture of routine eye exams, contact lens fits, dry eye treatments, and ocular aesthetics. Of the total amount of patients we see, approximately 70% of them are current contact lens wearers.

Optometrists know that fall begins the “seasonal surge” in our field. Back-to-school and holidays elevate the demand for contact lens exams, refits, and supply purchases. While practices are also preparing for the fast-approaching new year, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and lose sight of the main goal: providing patient-centric care. In this article, I will discuss how to streamline contact lens care to maximize OD chair time while maintaining a predictable, high-throughput schedule through automation, delegation, and staff training.

Simplified Lens Evaluations

At Line of Sight, my team and I aim to keep our contact lens evaluation system as simple as possible. Therefore, we offer a two-tiered fee system: evaluations for spherical and toric lenses have one price, and those for multifocal lenses have another. The patients appreciate this simplicity as well as the staff.

Our technicians conduct patients’ initial workups, during which time they review patients’ answers in the forms to reduce any confusion during the exam with the doctor. We also send our patients home with a one-page summary that captures everything discussed during their visit, either in paper form or as a QR code via email. These initiatives keep our schedules quite predictable and simplify our lens evaluations exponentially.

An additional benefit of a more streamlined evaluation approach is that it often allows our doctors to finalize patient prescriptions at the end of each visit. Before the patient leaves, the doctors hand their lens prescription to our sales advisor, who assists in encouraging and ordering a yearly supply of the prescribed lenses for the patient.

For patients who are not ready to order lenses that day, or who want to take a box of contact lenses home with them, we keep boxes of both trial lenses and some of our best-selling ready-to-wear lenses in the office, so that patients can leave with something in hand. Patients appreciate this convenience, and it reduces the potential for overthinking and possibly forgetting to order the lenses. If we don’t carry the trial lens that a patient needs, we will order it and encourage them to pick it up in the office, where we have both virtual and in-person assistants ready to help answer questions and capture the order. An invoice is then generated online, personally sent by our virtual staff, and placed through to begin the ordering process.

Delegate With Confidence

Another significant operational adjustment we have implemented is not only to delegate clinical tasks, but delegate with confidence. It’s important to develop confidence in your staff, that they can handle certain responsibilities such as vision checks, contact lens fittings, fit checks, and toric rotation checks as experts. This means setting them up for success. Our staff completes quarterly trainings, which enables our ODs to hand over these tasks with complete faith in our technicians’ abilities.

We also record our trainings and make them available to access through our online database for new team members or as refreshers for current staff. Monthly trainings are conducted with the full staff and quarterly trainings are done with our doctors to maintain updated information on new contact lens brands and parameters available. As the Clinical Director, I typically conduct these trainings. It’s also beneficial to run through a few different case scenarios as examples to help reduce the number of errors when issues do arise.

Overall, we delegate much of the process of appointment scheduling before patients even step foot in our office. For example, customized intake forms, medical consent forms, and treatment information forms are emailed to patients ahead of the visit. These forms capture information on our patients’ lifestyles, such as personal hobbies, driving habits, sport participation, and dry eye concerns.

Especially during the busier seasons, we make extra efforts to simplify all parts of our lens evaluation process. This includes automating as many patient touchpoints as possible, such as email/text reminders for prescription renewals and supply refills, particularly when the holidays are growing closer. We also have two staff members dedicated to reviewing contact lens prescriptions to decrease the margin of error and time spent on reordering, etc. Additionally, we create protocol sheets that serve as a reminder of this workflow, in case there are ever any mistakes or errors, so we have a roadmap for how to get back on track.

Communicate to Improve

Throughout each year, optometric practices can be subjected to a lot of changes, both internal and external. Beyond just seasonal shifts, practices may have to weather changes to staffing, workflow, pricing, etc. For example, while contact lens rebates are often standardized, sometimes they change. Especially when a manufacturer releases a new contact lens design, we try to support our team by creating resource materials that serve as reminders on lens types and specific fits to help minimize chair time and maximize patient satisfaction. Wherever possible, we try to anticipate pain points, provide the needed support, and delegate and automate as many tasks as possible to alleviate time pressures, increase valuable chair time, and improve our practice’s overall efficiency. Taking a little time each year to improve our operations allows us to focus more energy on treating the whole patient with the care they deserve.