The Official VisionWeb Blog

After you graduate from optometry school, there are many possible avenues for you to embark on. Private practices, lease-owned locations, and corporate locations are just a tip of the iceberg.

Many ODs start in one type of career and slowly start to realize what works best with their lifestyle and skill set. More than just better work hours or benefits, maybe you find yourself craving a consultant role? Or. maybe you don't want to work with the retail side for much longer.

If you're starting to put the pieces together to create your ideal career, we encourage you to start conversations with your colleagues. It might be closer to being reality than you think. Here's what you should be thinking about:

Technical project management has become extremely useful for technology companies with teams of developers. However, we've seen applications of common project management techniques can be useful for optical businesses as well.

These methodologies break down projects into tasks, resources, stakeholders, and other pertinent information. They can help manage your staff schedule, workflow, and your patient-facing operations. They can also help you incorporate learnings from failures into your workflow seamlessly. Keep reading to see which methodology might work for your practice below.

You'll reach a point in your marketing strategy planning where you feel zapped of creative ideas to get your practice on the map. Turning to industry blogs and researching competitor events is a good place to start. However, there are a few internal ways to boost innovation, too.

We suggest that you effectively gather ideas from everyone in your practice through an innovation program. These programs use strategic methods to bring out new, possibly out-of-the-box ideas to improve your day-to-day processes or keep up with the changing industry. Keep reading to see how this could apply to you.

Our last installment of the financial guide was on budgeting your marketing campaigns. Access it here if you missed it. This month we'll be thinking about the return of investment on conferences, tradeshows, and other industry events.

Not only do you have to consider the cost of attendance, but also factor in the flights, hotels, transportation, and loss of opportunity ODs incur taking time away from your practice. As an optometrist, you'll have to choose which conferences are convenient, which CE courses you need, calculate how many days you can afford to be away, and set up business meetings in advance. 

We'll help you break down if you can earn your expenditures back in the post below.

This halloween, there's only one thing that seems to scare optometrists: lost insurance reimbursements. Your gut reaction might be to hire someone to figure out why you're not getting paid. However, hiring a full-time in-house biller isn't the only solution to your problems.

We'll show you how to empower your staff with the basic billing, coding, and financial knowledge they need to navigate the complicated insurance rules. Then, you can decide the best method to manage your insurance revenue moving forward.