Practice Management

In Part 5 of his five-part blog series on vision care plan gripes, Carl Spear, OD, MBA, FAAO, discusses how misleading and wrong information can affect patients’ perceptions of your clinical care and practice.

Find out what drives your fellow ODs crazy during the holidays.

Tracy Schroeder Swartz, OD, FAAO describes how her life as an OD during the holidays changed over time. From after graduation to having her own family, Dr. Swartz finds that the balance has changed.

Like weather forecasting, forecasting in our optometric practices has also come a long way. Today’s software programs have every imaginable piece of data about our practices. But unfortunately, most of us don’t know how to use the data. The problem is there is so much data and information, it is hard to know what to pay attention to.

I thought I would create office policies to control my office life because the patients will follow my long list of rules just like my children listen to rules at home. Feel free to use it at your office.

Almost every eyecare practice has a person, team of people, or outside service whose sole job is to manage problems related to facilitating the relationship between patients and their insurance companies.

Professional courtesy, waiving all or part of professional fees, now has become a field day for lawyers and third-party carriers-and an unwary trap for the well-intentioned doctor.

So, in optometry, with online refractions, online sales of eyeglasses and contact lenses, and in the face of reduced insurance reimbursements, is true practice autonomy attainable?

It is not uncommon to hear people talk about the health of their practices by confidently stating how far they are “booked out.” How long it takes for a patient to get an appointment is often a statement of practice wellness.

Have you ever sat in the exam room with a patient and felt like the exam had gotten away from you?

To gauge what the new year will bring, we asked experts to weigh in on what challenges they expect optometrists to face in 2017

To protect you and your practice, it is important to have a plan and process in place in the case of an audit

As we welcome a new year, now is a great time to look back at what we could have done better in 2016 and set goals for 2017. We asked eyecare professionals from around the country what their New Year’s resolutions are, both inside and outside of the practice.

Make a more deliberate effort to be present with your patients

No-shows and cancellations are an annoying part of any optometry practice. They are disruptive and costly, but mostly they are rude.

Before the new year gets too far along, let’s take a brief look at the happenings in the pages of Optometry Times during 2016.

The holiday season can be a stressful time for anyone, but for optometrists, there are a laundry list of situations that happen in and outside of your practice that make this time of year extra hectic. We asked our Editorial Advisory Board to share one thing that drives them crazy during the holiday season.

Opening a practice of your own can be quite overwhelming and can leave you wondering where to start.

Applying the Golden Metric when creating a budget and increasing your profits

I am sure we are all familiar with stress because I do not think you can become an OD without dealing with a large amount of it. In case you are not aware, stress is good in short doses. But large daily doses over years is bad.

Ever feel like you were on a sinking ship? Sometimes you want to be the one to jump off!

You’ve probably heard the term “hive mentality” before. Many times its meaning does not carry a positive connotation.

In honor of Halloween, you’re getting an updated batch of staff horror stories.

Here are a couple of tips our practice uses to celebrate the Halloween fun safely and successfully.

Dress for success. We’ve heard this tired old cliché for years. Most offices have a written dress code for staff, but does that dress code also apply to the doctors?

One of the hallmarks of a good college football team is to finish strong. That means that as the team heads into the fourth quarter, it needs to close out the game and play all the way to the end.

What do you think it would be like to practice in an environment free of competition? How about having a complete lock on a market?

We’re no exception to the online perfect perception. You only need to check out our practice Instagram page, @seeeyecareandeyewear, to see all the photos that I have painstakingly staged.