The Official VisionWeb Blog

Your appointment schedule defines your day. In an optometric practice, having a full schedule means more money that you can use to invest in your practice. Unfortunately, there are times where your staff may hack your patient schedule by booking placeholder appointments and assigning the “no-show” status to them.

These bogus appointments may be scheduled to help your staff leave early or give them more time to catch up on their administrative duties. But, in the end, they’re driving away legitimate patients, hurting your practice, and jeopardizing you and your staffs’ income.

This post provides a few telltale signs that your staff may be sabotaging your patient scheduling with fake appointments.

We all have basic needs for food, water, and shelter. These must be satisfied at certain times of day and are usually both predictable and obvious. Can this idea be translated to the needs of patients? 

After reading this article from Hubspot's blog, we saw parallels within the eyecare industry. Although optometrists are well equipped to handle the medical and health needs of patients, they might not fully grasp what patients require from the customer service side of the practice. We'll go over how each service need applies to eyecare professionals.

When you land a valuable and loyal employee in your eyecare practice it's important to be able to meet their needs and keep them around for more than a few years. With many practices, employee turnover can be high, and higher turn over is going to cost you more money in hiring and training new employees. Which is why you'll do almost everything you can in order to hang on to those employees that you value the most.

We've got 4 tips that we think will help you create a stellar practice atmosphere, and if you can create a place that your employees want to be you should be one step closer to keeping them around for the long haul. 

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.