The Official VisionWeb Blog

The life of an OD is hectic even when patients aren't undergoing exams. Whether you run a single OD practice, collaborate with multiple ODs in a single location, or fill the need of a retail location, the long hours, working weekends, and unpredictable patient schedule can take a toll on the OD's life, stress levels, and ability to provide unobstructed care.

When running an optometric practice, there are a few strategies that can help take some of the stress off of your day-to-day activities and to make your life easier.

The staff you hire is a reflection of how you deliver care to your community. The wrong hire for any position in your optometric practice can create tension between your staff and your patients. When it comes time to hire an associate OD for your optometric practice, you want to ask thoughtful questions that will ensure that the associate OD will get along with your staff and be committed to giving the patients in your community the best care possible.

Hiring an associate OD may require a few rounds of interviews to feel confident that you’re selecting the best candidate for your patients, practice, and staff. Here are a few questions you could ask during the first round of interviews.

Some practices, especially those that have had about 5-10 years to establish themselves within their community, find themselves with an excess in cash reserves. If you're in this position, you could be considering a few investment options that are either within your practice or external methods to earn investment income.

Investing extra income obviously comes in handy to provide more short-term returns that you can put back into your practice by upgrading your software or medical devices. Especially during a recession or downturn in the economy, investing may be scary. However, if your practice is experiencing a steady flow of patients and income, a downturn could be the best opportunity to put cash back into the economy. Keep reading to see the different options in front of you.

The importance of approaching patient care with a sense of emotional intelligence might be familiar to some, but a newer concept for others. Emotional intelligence is the ability to read and respond to emotions through body language, tone, and verbal responses in order to deepen your understanding of the world and interpersonal relationships.

There are a handful of resources online that discuss the facets of developing emotional intelligence for personal growth, but we want to focus on eyecare today. We'll highlight a few ways that high emotional intelligence can help every member of your staff not only improve communication with and care for patients, but also with their fellow team members.

As a solo optometric practice owner, you juggle many jobs throughout the day; from CEO, to doctor, to manager, to marketer, to salesperson. But, outside of work, you also have responsibilities to yourself, your friends, and your family. As a parent, friend, sibling, or spouse, you have to focus your time and energy on managing those relationships and ensuring that at the end of the day, you're achieving an optimized work-life balance.

To help you make the most out of the time at the office, we put some put some time management tips together.