Less is More for Contact Lenses in Your Practice

Chances are, your contact lens stockroom looks a little like the artificial tear aisle at the drugstore—endless shelves of monthly and daily modalities, spherical, toric, and multifocal options. Whatever your delight, whether silicone hydrogel, surface-modified, or water gradient, you have it all squeezed into a closest, a room, or that one corner in the office. How do you pick the best one for your patient?

There are many lens types and brands that are stellar, each with an enormous amount of technology packed into such a little device. Better comfort, better wettability, new materials, with a special sauce of comfort, cushioning, and clarity mixed right into the lens and baked to perfection. Perhaps a baking analogy is a bit weird, but you get the point: so many options, and they are all phenomenal.

Oh, the pressure to fit this or that brand. Is it cost? Is it the lens material? Is it the modality? Is it the parameters? The comfort? The optics? Is it patients’ knowledge of what they have seen online or heard from a friend or what their previous optometrist fit them in?

In this article, I’m not going to tell you which single brand or brands to fit, but I am going to encourage you to pick a lane, and stay in it. That is, stick to a smaller number of brands to fit and sell in your office. In this situation, less is more. Let me explain why.

HELP STAFF BECOME MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE

It’s easier for your staff members to remember the details, parameters, offers, rebates, and overall costs for one brand, rather than four or five, in order to educate patients and recommend options. Yes, ultimately it is the doctor who makes the chairside recommendation, but it’s your staff members who are breaking down insurance details, answering a host of questions, and following up with supply information.

And dare I say, patients don’t always abide by the Holy Grail contact lens speech you gave them in the exam room. Sometimes they want real talk, and your staff member is there to break it down for them. Staff members who are knowledgeable are immensely valuable to your patients and to your practice.

This is one thing that online retail options cannot offer: a real human being who knows the ins and outs of contact lenses and, more important, has the patient’s best interests (and your practice’s too) in mind. With your staff well informed about a specific contact lens brand, you can recommend the best option for the patient based on your knowledge of prescription and eye health, and leave the rest to your staff.

STAY COMPETITIVE AND USE RESOURCES TO BEST FIT YOUR NEEDS

Contact lens manufacturers offer incentives for you to do more business with them. If you are giving 10% of your business to Brand A, 20% to Brand B, 30% to Brand C, and so on, you are limiting growth rebates and other incentives designed to help private practices stay competitive.

You can’t maximize your growth rebates and discounts when you spread yourself too thin. It can be hard to compete with online mega-retail prices, but it evens the game when you can maximize your margins, reduce costs, and strategically get more out of your relationships with contact lens manufacturers.

Recently, some contact lens manufacturers have begun to offer online platforms that can provide resources to monitor practice management growth, specifically statistics on brands and lens modalities, annual supplies, revenue, and more. These numbers can help you to identify areas for improvement and growth and can provide extra insight in addition to your own practice management software.

MASTER CONTACT LENS FITTING AND TROUBLE-SHOOTING

With a limited offering, your well-informed staff knows the brand better. But, even more important, so do you. You can speak more confidently about every nuance of the lens. No longer do you have to remember all that information on the cool brochure card that the rep brought in, with the diagram and the study data that confirm how extraordinary the lens is. Sometimes it is hard to remember all those details while you are running all other aspects of the practice and patient care.

With limited options, fitting becomes easier, and no longer are you guessing whether or not this particular brand comes in a -2.75 D cylinder. This is especially helpful when it comes to multifocal lens patients and the chair time associated with fitting multifocal lenses.

When you limit your offerings, you start seeing trends, patterns, and possible problems sooner. You know what to expect from the lens, and you can anticipate the needs of your patients. You can make adjustments faster and more effectively. Plus, there are fewer lenses you or your staff have to painfully add into your electronic medical records system. (Your staff will thank you for this one.)

All in all, you become a better problem solver, and, just as you have mastered the art of prescribing spectacle lenses, you can now add contact lens mastery as another notch on your belt.

CHOOSE WISELY

Given all of the above, be sure to pick your brand or brands wisely. If you lock your practice in to a brand only because it’s the flavor of the week, the decision can come back to bite you. It can be hard to change lanes once your staff members are educated and trained. Habits are hard to break for staff, for patients, and, let’s face it, for doctors too. Switching from focus on one brand to focus on another could mean rearranging your entire contact lens practice trajectory.

When you are deciding on the best contact lens manufacturers to bring into your practice, it is important to keep it simple. Consider what would help your patients the most and what would help your practice grow. Key factors to think about include patient demographics, contact lens costs, patient satisfaction, incentives, rebates, technology, ease of fit, chair time, and cost for patients.

Use your practice management system to track or manually set up contact lens statistics that your staff can track for you. This is a great way to get the real numbers on which brands you are successfully fitting, and this can help determine if you are in a bit of a traffic jam (occupying too many lanes) or staying in one lane, so to speak. Hopefully this review of your numbers can help you narrow down to a limited number of brands that offer the best fit for your patients, your practice, and your staff.