Your Eyes, Vital Practice Management Tool

Here is an interesting practice management concept that optometrists can use that was once taught to engineers. Look, don’t think. This can be applied in our everyday lives quite easily. The air conditioner doesn’t work, get it checked out; don’t just think of what might be wrong. A child cries, go look and see what happened; you wouldn’t sit there and wonder. There could be many things wrong in a given situation, but frequently there is really just one main thing wrong. Go look and find out what that thing might be. Look, don’t think.

The real problem is not whether or not to look at our own practice, but HOW in the world do you look at something that is around your ears. Very hard to see something you are wrapped up in. It’s why I took enthusiastically to the practice management system we use here at Vision Practice Management, Inc.

Obviously it takes more than walking in the front door and looking at your practice to get it to run well, but this is not a bad place to start. What is needed to get anywhere with this is knowing in advance how it SHOULD look in order to be successful. If you have that worked out firmly based on broad successful experience rather than fixed ideas that don’t hold water, then you can do some marvelous things as a result of this very simple activity.

1)  You can establish for your practice how all the critical elements of your practice SHOULD look.

2) Now you have a standard and you can observe what is actually going on and you can see the “outpoints,” illogical points that don’t help you survive or even threaten your survival. They stand out like the proverbial sore thumbs.

You do this with eye exams all the time. We do it with practices, because that’s where we are the “doctors.”

Knowing what these “outpoints” are in an optometry practice and how to spot them is a whole other subject of intense interest, and one I am not going into right now. The thing to know is that outpoints can actually be tallied and categorized, and just by this simple action of observing, noting down and categorizing, we will open the door to finding out the actual source of the problem and what you need to do to get your practice prospering.

Of course there is a lot more to this than meets the eye, but at least you have a starting point. If you would like to have more of the rundown on this, contact us.  We are happy to help.

Yours for prosperity,

John L. Brinkley, OD, FCOVD
President
and
David Sanders, CMC
CEO and Senior Consultant
Vision Practice Management, Inc.