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Imagine you are a brand new employee and you answer the phone in the office. After a rehearsed, professional, and pleasant greeting, you ask, "how may I help you this morning?" 

A young man answers, "I have to get in to see someone today!" His voice is shaky and he sounds like he is in pain. As a new employee, you can feel your heart rate going up and you are sitting up straighter, questioning what do I do now? 

  1. Be calm– Think emergency dispatcher. No matter how dire the situation, your job requires clearheaded thinking and compassionate communication. 
  2. Initiate your triage strategy - Pull up the form and begin asking the questions. Start with their name and the best contact number, then work your way methodically down the question list. 
  3. Offer just in time care - What if it turns out that the dire situation is that the young man is leaving on a weeklong heli-skiing trip tomorrow and he just realized he is out of daily contact lenses? In our opinion, the best way to ensure that your optometric business continues to succeed is to always accommodate a patients request just in time. Sure, the young man might need to be strategically scheduled later in the day if his prescription has expired, since this is hardly a medical emergency. Still, it's a valid emergency to him. Honor that feeling and work him in. Make him feel like he is a priority to you. If you don’t, he'll likely take his business elsewhere.

Triage is one of the most stressful responsibilities in medical reception. Make sure all of your employees, new and established, are clear on your scheduling philosophy (just in time or otherwise), and have the most effective tools at their fingertips to handle those calls. This will go a long way in helping your team feel confident in how they handle the patient on the other end of the line. 

Plan of action:  

  • In your next staff meeting, review your phone triage procedures and tools (10 minutes) 
  • Divide up into pairs and role play triage calls (15 minutes) 
  • Debrief as a team to answer any questions and consider any ideas that arise during the role play  

Get help with implementing a just in time philosophy in your office today! Join our Executive Management Program.

Bess Ogden

Director of Education and Training
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One of my favorite songs is “Lovely Day” by Bill Withers. A lovely day in optometry is one in which every templated appointment on your schedule has been used by a well-cared for patient. In this world of pandemics, traffic, homeschooling, after-school activities, meetings, services, and at times overwhelming busy-ness, your patients will no-show, cancel, and reschedule. It’s always been a challenge to the practice and Covid-19 has made it harder than ever to control. Don’t blame your patients! You know exactly how they feel on those not so lovely days.

If there were ever a time to have a carefully crafted, consistently kept Patient Courtesy List, THIS IS THAT TIME. You are providing a courtesy to your patients, and this strategic tool can make or break your business. Your entire team must know how to professionally gather the relevant information while scheduling. It’s not hard, but it takes intent: ”At times Dr. Jo has a change in her schedule. If this happens may we contact you to offer you an earlier appointment? About how much notice would you need to get to the office? 20 minutes? An hour?” This information must be logged accurately and made available to everyone on the team at a minute’s notice.

When an opening in the schedule occurs, the whole crew must be poised to leap into action, implementing your sliding schedule strategies to fill that opening as soon as possible. Your primary receptionist or Patient Care Facilitator will lead the charge and will call in the rest of the troops, if assistance is needed. Be ready.

Give yourself a safety net that you can employ if you just can’t fill those open slots before they pass by. The safety net can take many forms, from opening up lunch slots, to later night slots, to unblocking an admin Friday afternoon. Keep in mind the purpose of a safety net: It’s only there in case you fall/fail. If you are all using your Courtesy Lists and Sliding Schedule procedures well, you’ll rarely need to use it. You’ll be glad you have it, though, when you need to use it!

Here’s to fewer lost days, and more lovely days ahead.

Let us help you implement a carefully crafted, consistent Patient Courtesy List within your practice. 

Join our Executive Management Program today!

Bess Ogden

Director of Education and Training
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Good. Better. Best. When you are considering which brand of canned corn to buy, they probably all are good. But frozen corn is better. And, the best? That’s straight off the corn cob, in my opinion!

Where does your practice stand; good, better or best? Do you know what your patients are looking for? Is it a good eye exam, the cheapest frames, or do they want the best? When it comes to setting the tone of your practice, your entire team is responsible. Your team has the power to influence the best eye care experience at a price point no one can refuse. By spending as little as 3 minutes on the phone with a potential patient, you can achieve this.

Williams Group has curated scripts that answer the most common questions a potential patient asks when shopping around for an eye care appointment. The education your team provides on the phone showcases the atmosphere, technology and expertise living in your practice right now. It can also mean the difference between the caller hanging up and dialing the next eye care professional three blocks away or securing their appointment, even an appointment for their family members.

Do you thrive on treating the whole patient and offer nutraceuticals? Do you have frame stylists that understand face shape and hair/eye color to pick out the latest Gucci frame everyone is craving? Maybe serving kids is where you really shine (did we mention that awesome coffee bar you’ve got for mom while she’s waiting?) These niches are important to showcase for your potential patients.

Through strategic tactics and exercises, Williams Group will evaluate how your practice stacks up. With guidance from our Practice Management Directors, your practice will set the bar for your competition. In conjunction, you’ll watch your profits grow.

As an eye care professional, it’s important to have someone on your side to objectively see your long-term goals and drive the performance of your optometry practice.

Join our Intensive Growth Program today!

Michele Korth

Practice Management Coordinator
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Providing exceptional customer satisfaction is a huge aspect in nearly every organization. Excelling in 5 STAR patient care takes it a step further to ensure we are treating and caring for our patients on another level while still providing exceptional customer satisfaction. We encourage our clients to consistently provide satisfying, timely, attainable, and result-driven care with each and every patient that walks through the doors of the practice. 

Understanding the patient care cycle within the optometry practice is an important factor in ensuring that we help guide our practice in the right direction for success. By understanding the patient care cycle, we are able to better enhance our patient experience and ensure that we are providing 5 STAR care, for every patient.  

Look at the practice from a different perspective - walk into the practice with the eyes of a patient to evaluate the processes and procedures. We must take a moment with our team to identify and review each stage of the patient care cycle within the practice and take time to evaluate the processes and procedures - identify possible flaws and potential opportunities. Not only do you have to identify possible flaws and potential opportunities - you must act to improve or enhance the patient care cycle in your practice based on your findings.  

Providing 5 STAR patient care is certainly a team approach - it only takes one person throughout the entire patient care cycle to negatively affect the patient's experience. As the optometrist and owner of the practice, express your expectations to the team and consistently speak to the importance of providing 5 STAR patient care. After all, without patients, nothing else matters.

Want to know more about Excelling in 5 Star Patient Care? Join our Executive Management Program.

Already a member? Access our course, Excelling in 5 Star Patient Care, to learn more.

 

Michelle Bogeart

Executive Management Coach
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Is 2019 the Year You Actually MANAGE Your Profit?

Perhaps you’ve heard the news that Williams Group FastTrack clients have seen steady revenue growth in 2018 thanks to the program, but what really has me excited as we roll into the new year is the profit growth!

Remember, as we grow practice revenue, we want to be growing profit disproportionately.  Disproportionately, that is, in favor of HIGHER profit, of course. In other words, as we grow top-line revenue, we want the bottom-line percentageof that revenue to INCREASE, not decrease.  It absolutely can do so, but we often see the opposite – high grossing practices with lower overall profit percentages (although total dollars of profit are likely higher).  Does it strike you there’s something wrong with that picture?

The reason for this is really quite simple – as practices grow (and grow and grow and grow, because you’re good at what you do and you’re patronized for that), many CEOs (that’s you, Doc) manage revenue and expense relationships byHOPE.…You know,“As my practice grows (and grows and grows and grows), I HOPE there’s more left for me after everyone else is paid…”  

Don’t get me wrong… hope is great. I love hope. I tend to live my life as a hopeful person.  But management by hope will only get a practice so far.  At some point, profit is a product of intelligent design, not just crossed fingers.

If I’ve learned anything in 33 years of consulting, it’s that increasing profit is a decision, before it’s a set of initiatives. We decide that we’re actually going to manage profit (my personal definition of “manage” is “choosing to control an outcome”),then we put together an action plan of initiatives that make it impossible not to do so.So if we’re going to manage our profit, we need first to make a decision, then form a very specific objective (and sub-objectives), then prescribe a set of initiatives that will power it to happen.

In reality, most practice owners have this completely backwards. They expose themselves to a set of initiatives (good ideas at the peer-to-peer meetings, lectures, articles, webinars, etc.), but they didn’t first make some sort of decision. It’s kind of like diets. I end up hearing about the newest diet that worked well for a friend, but I didn’t first make a decision about what I was going to accomplish before learning about the diet (probably any diet would work if I’ve made a decision). So with my actions not powered by a decision, and I don’t stay with it and my attempted diet fails. It’s not that the diet (the initiatives) doesn’t work; but rather, that it didn’t work for me.   

Likewise, we may get all kinds of ideas to grow practice profit (or any other practice result), but those ideas weren’t powered by a decision. Did you ever wonder why we don’t implement the stuff we hear at seminars? There you go!(and believe me, it’s not just you…) But hey, at least we had some nice dinners and saw some good friends at the meeting.

How about this, to kick off the new year instead, let’s begin with the end in mind. Let’s make a decision that we’re going to be more profitable. That’s how it’s going to be, period. Then let’s set a very specific objective for practice profitability, and work backwards. Let’s next set the sub-objectives (which we will need both for the revenue and expense sides as well as team productivity and other key metrics). By the way, most staff have no idea what our metric objectives are, so setting these will be a wonderful exercise in which to involve the team. You may not share overall profit objectives with the team, but they should certainly know and be involved in setting our objectives for key production metrics.

When we have these defined, THEN let’s develop and prescribe a set of initiatives that are as foolproof to our outcome as your prescription is for my presbyopia. In fact, it works remarkably similar. As my optometrist, you made a conscious decision regarding the outcome of my vision (to improve it up-close and distant) as your patient, committed to that decision with a very specific objective (20/20 vision), which deliberately drove your actions and ultimately your prescription to get me there. Decision, objective, prescribed initiatives and outcome. Provided I fill the prescription (i.e. – IMPLEMENT the initiatives!), I’ll have my perfect vision. Now then, just practice what you practice!

Learn more about our FastTrack programs.

Tom Bowen

Executive Vice President
Williams Group
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(As printed in Eyecare Business, November 2016)

I call it The Tale of Two Practices. One practice is experiencing a decline in patients, while another a few blocks away doesn’t have an empty slot for months. One practice is turning one third of its staff over every year, while another keeps its staff for decades. One practice has a toxic work culture, and another has a staff on fire.

Another example is two doctors in the same practice (as in, inside exactly the same walls, same staff, same products, same managed care plans) have a revenue-per-patient that’s $200 different (I see this one a lot). One $2 million practice is netting 36%, and one’s netting 10%. One practice for sale sits on the market for years and settles for selling the records, while another is sold in a month and brings a premium. So what’s the point? Simple. You control all of these outcomes.

Not Obamacare. Not third parties. Not the economy. Not the competition or the Internet. It is YOU that controls these outcomes. Here’s how.

DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE

As we work with practices day in and day out, it’s plain enough to see the vast differences in outcomes from one practice to another. More so today, I think, than ever in my nearly 30 years working with practice owners.

As we kick off this new column about Surviving in a Managed Care World, it is of the utmost importance that we keep this in mind. Having lectured coast-to-coast these past few months, I conclude that many colleagues have been duped.
They are convinced in earnest that they’ve lost control of these and related practice outcomes. This trickery, I’m certain, is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for many colleagues, and this, in itself, is the greatest contributor to some private practices making the endangered species list.

That’s not to say our managed care world doesn’t pose challenges. Dwindling revenue-per-patient, increased regulation, compliance concerns, Meaningful use fears (and fear mongering), the see-saw regarding government health programs (are they here to stay, will they be repealed?), etc., etc., etc. Every practice owner is experiencing these challenges; but there are amazing differences in how they are being met, and in the results practices are experiencing.

Controlling Your Own Outcome

Again, the simple fact is we DO control our outcomes. We always have, and we still do (provided we choose to). Here are a few evidences of that from conversations of late:

  • A New Mexico practice is celebrating 25 years, and seeing 20% growth (that’s better growth than many practices only open five years!)
  • A Wisconsin practice did over $2 million again last year and still takes no vision plans (in the heart of managed care country). It’s true.
  • A Montana practice is breaking ground on its third addition of thousands of square feet, after 25 straight record years, despite Costco’s best efforts down the street.
  • A practice in Missouri is seeing its staff ON FIRE after implementing a new profit-sharing plan, experiencing its best doctor day production in a decades-long history.
  • A practice in New York will be selling for a premium shortly, after putting together a string of its best three years of profit in a row.
  • A practice in California had gross billings of nearly $3 million on one doctor before adding its first associate.
  • A practice in Indiana signed up enough companies on its own vision benefits plan that it dumped all of its least-liked third party plans.
  • A practice in Florida has returned to record production after several consecutive years of practice recession.
  • A practice in Oregon has tripled its medical optometry revenues in the last few years.
  • A practice owner in Colorado recently proclaimed, “Owning my practice is fun again,” after tackling a number of employee issues and reducing her work week.

There is, of course, the doom-and-gloom crowd that believes private practice is on borrowed time. But this is not my experience at all—I’m talking to our colleagues, every day, and yes, there are plenty of challenges. But we can choose to control the outcomes.

And, as far as third-party plans, the more things look the same (managed care), the greater the opportunities for the creative to be different. Even in this managed care world, we can and will implement initiatives to control growth, revenue-per-patient, patient retention, new patients, staff productivity, inventory turnover, no shows, profitability and yes, life balance in practice ownership.

Tom Bowen

 

Executive Vice President
Williams Group
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It happens to everyone—you work hard running your practice, seeing patients, delegating to staff, and managing the additional responsibilities that come with being a business owner. Inevitably, at some point you will begin to feel burnt out from the day-to-day chaos.

Independent optometric practice can be an extremely rewarding profession, but as a health care practitioner, the additional pressures of small business ownership may feel like more than you signed on for. When you’re dealing with insurance companies and no-shows and continuing education, remembering what drew you to the field of optometry in the first place can get lost in the daily grind.

That’s why taking a vacation or time off is essential to your personal and professional health. It’s natural to be concerned about how your business will run when you’re MIA. If you’re a partner or part of a larger practice, things will probably continue, business as usual. But even if you’re operating on your own, time off could end up being very fruitful for your business.

Why? Because everyone needs a break. People need time to press pause and decompress. Being a business owner and health care provider doesn’t allow for a lot of downtime—you’re basically working two full-time jobs. Stress and exhaustion can affect your interactions with your patients, your employees, and your family. That affects your practice’s bottom line negatively. A frustrated employee may not be as motivated to work hard for you. A patient who feels like you were impatient with them may move on to a different practice. The list goes on.

Give yourself permission to take time off from work. The world will continue turning whether you’re in the office one week or not. Or give yourself a day off occasionally. If you’re working with Williams Group, we’re providing you with the processes and procedures to allow you to enjoy a little more time off.  Spend time doing other hobbies, enjoy moments with your family, and experience life in general. Your work is only part of what makes you a great optometrist—your life experiences will add vibrancy and color to your personality and the way you practice. That’s what will continue to bring patients in the door.

How many hours a week do you work? When was the last time you took a vacation?

Tom Bowen

Executive Vice President
Williams Group
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Many ODs are starting to recognize the value in having a social media presence. The question is no longer whether you should use social media for practice, but how should you use social media for your practice. There are a vast amount of social media channels available and various ways to use them. You may not have the resources of Zappos.com or Pepsi, but you can still find ways to leverage social media to benefit your practice. So without further ado, here is the first thing you can do to enhance your practice’s social media presence.

Get started. 
At the risk of being obvious, you can’t leverage your social media presence if you’re not even in the game. It can be overwhelming when you’re not sure where to begin, but something is better than nothing 100% of the time.

  • Get on Facebook. With 67% of internet users active on Facebook, having a presence on this social network is essential for your practice. Odds are, the majority of your patients have Facebook accounts (not to mention your competitors). 

Facebook also offers a significant opportunity to provide a higher level of customer service to your patients. So if you don’t know where to start, start by creating a Facebook account for your practice and commit to updating it regularly (whether that’s once a day or once a week). Again, anything is better than nothing.
  • Start a Twitter feed. Like Facebook, Twitter is a great place to service your clients. With the #hashtag search function and the short and sweet 140-character limit, this micro-blogging network is appealing and user-friendly. It’s also easily linked to your Facebook account, so you don’t necessarily need to spend extra time posting to two separate social media channels.
  • Try LinkedIn. While LinkedIn isn’t primarily designed for business-to-consumer relationships, it’s a great place for you to network with other professionals and stay on top of current news and trends in the optometry industry. Join discussion groups focused on optometry and keep an eye out for potential rock star hires in your area.

Tom Bowen

Executive Vice President
Williams Group
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