Whether you’re adding an exam lane, expanding the reception area, or just trying to grow into the adjacent office space, the decision to expand your optometric practice should be carefully calculated to ensure the continued success of your business.
Below are 3 tips to help you decide if it’s the right time for you to expand your practice.
Key Considerations When Expanding Your Optometric Practice
Assess Equipment Needs
Adding an exam lane or pre-testing lane can help you move more patients through your optometric practice. However, to build out these lanes, you’ll need to obtain equipment and technology that assists you and your staff’s ability to provide exceptional care to your patients.
Since buying new equipment is an expensive undertaking, look for ways to save like asking for a vendor discount or checking for discounts through optometry organizations.
Evaluate Office Workflow
Expanding your optometric practice may give you the extra exam room you need to see more patients and optimize your patient schedule, but if your office workflow isn’t streamlined, then you may be putting your staff and patients through more of a headache than before.
Before making the decision to expand your practice, look at your office workflow to identify bottlenecks and areas where you can reduce inefficiencies either through the use of technology, by delegating tasks, or by hiring more staff members.
If you’re building out a new exam lane, then as the OD, you want to make sure you have enough time to provide optimal care without feeling rushed. One way to do this is to offload some of the pre-testing tasks to your technician.
See how one OD was able to add three additional exam slots a day by streamlining his office workflow
Calculate Cost of Expansion
After you have assessed your equipment needs and evaluated your office workflow constraints, you want to calculate the overall cost of expanding your practice and determine how many additional exam slots you’ll need to add each day to pay for the expenses. By making these calculations, you can determine if you’re practice is able to afford the expansion and estimate your return on investment. In this article, the OD calculated that he needed to add one exam slot a day to cover the expense of expanding.
For more tips on how you can streamline your office workflow, download our practice efficiency ebook!
