The Official VisionWeb Blog

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.

Uncertainty is tough on a practice owner. On top of taking swift action to preserve the financial life of your practice, optometrists need to boost the morale of their staff and work hard to retain existing patients. However, ODs don't have to navigate these challenges alone.

Actionable advice and stories from ODs with experience handling practice closures, lease changes, pandemics, abrupt change, and demotivated staff are invaluable to make your practice adaptable for any obstacle.

We include communication plans, staff management techniques, interviews with ODs, and possible growth opportunities in this new resource.

The use of a patient portal in your eyecare practice will have a lot of benefits for both you and your patients. But sometimes, practices can run into challenges getting all of the benefits out of a patient portal due to lack of acceptance, promotion, or use by your patients. We found survery data that talks about some of the features that patients enjoy the most from patient portals.