Things Worth Sharing
Options for Student Loan Repayment assistance in optometry. Some are for current students and some are for graduates: Link
PRIMA retinal implant receives European clearance. Mean improvement of 5 lines BCVA improvement in those who have vision loss from geographic atrophy: Link
Safety of repeated low-level red-light therapy for myopia: A systematic review, Chen, et al. Link
Red light therapy for myopia control has shown some promising trials in China. Interestingly, as benign as red light therapy appears to be, complications can still happen. Its safety profile appears to be stronger than contacts, similar to glasses options.
Field Note
Every minute a patient spends waiting reduces the amount of patience they have left for the care we still need to provide.
My first fill-in job was at a Target Optical. I would help out once a month on Saturdays. Let me tell you, they had their operations down.
The practice policy required patients to fill out their online paperwork before the day of their exam or the visit was canceled. Consequently, when the patient arrived, they were ready for the doctor in 5 minutes.
But what shocked me wasn’t the 20 minute visit. When I would ask a patient to dilate their eyes, they almost always said yes.
I hadn’t changed my verbiage. It was a very similar demographic to my main practice. But because the exam experience was so short, they had more time to wait the extra 20 minutes for the dilated exam.
Doctors (including me) often pride ourselves on how fast we can see patients. But patients don’t experience the doctor's portion in isolation. They experience:
Check-in
Preliminary Testing
The examination
(Dilation or additional testing)
(Optical)
Checkout
And there are handoffs that happen between each point.
A fast doctor can still exist inside a slow overall visit.
Timely staff operations and smooth handoffs can also improve patient care. Similar to my Target patients being more open to dilation, patients may be more engaged during the examination, more receptive to education, and more receptive to treatments.
What I’m trying to get at: speed and quality are not always opposites. If one increases, the other does not always decrease. When we eliminate unnecessary waiting, we may be able to improve both at the same time.
What part of the patient visit creates the most unexpected delays in your practice? Feel free to answer this email directly.