Guest blog post by Richard C. Edlow, O.D. Chief Executive Officer, Katzen Eye Group.
With the demand for patient services increasing and reimbursement rates simultaneously declining, eye care practices are facing ongoing challenges to their limited resources. If you run a practice, you understand how difficult it can be to do it all: provide great patient care and improve patient satisfaction, manage an efficient office plus recruit, train and retain an experienced and reliable staff.
What’s the solution?
A Productive & Profitable Practice
Increasing productivity and efficiency is the only way to profitably manage declining reimbursement and increasing demand. Fortunately, this is an achievable goal by when you leverage new technology in your eye care practice. The past five to 10 years have brought about technological advances that allow various devices and software packages to communicate and interface smoothly with each other, thus creating productivity gains.
The first step to running a more efficient office is identifying and addressing any gaps in staffing or employee training. Most ophthalmic Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems can readily accept dozens of data points from automated refractive equipment. This simple (for the user) process allows your practice to hire and train someone with no prior eye care experience to perform a relatively accurate refraction after only two weeks of training. Your employee will also be able to capture lensometry, keratometry, intraocular pressure and aberrometry, plus accurately transfer all the data into the patient’s electronic record. We have found that utilizing available technology significantly shortens the time frame for new employee training.
3 Technological Applications for Employee Training
- Every new staff member first views the entire content of patient education modules found in the Eyemaginations program. This immediately gives them an excellent overall 30,000-foot view of what we do.
- We then enroll new employees in the BSM/Allergen Access training modules, which varies depending on their role within the practice.
- Finally, we find that every new clinical staff member gets up to speed with charting dramatically quicker by simply following our EHR templates. It is as simple as this format: Capture and enter findings, click “next,” capture and enter findings, click “next.” Before you know it, a complete work-up is in the proper order.