Slow Days, Smart Moves: Boosting Your Optometry Practice in Downtime

There are many benefits of having accountability partners or a close group of colleagues you can learn from, lean on and rely on. Another benefit? You can always get a pulse on what is going on industrywide in real time. That is especially helpful for the the slower times in your office, when you and your staff have more downtime than you may want.

Recognizing Industrywide Shifts in Real Time

As a cold start, we don’t have much historical data to rely on and are prone to having larger shifts in revenue and patient scheduling. What was interesting this spring is many practices were seeing similar shifts—both in how full their schedules were, and what patients were spending. I read echoing comments on online forums and groups, and contact lens and frame reps also reported similar trends in their territory.

How Successful Practices Respond to Change

Without getting into the “whys” this may (or may not) be happening, I wanted to reflect on what I see successful practices do when they feel a change. Instead of panicking, what are some steps we can take to fill our schedules, run our practices efficiently and effectively and keep our profitability up?

The Importance of Monitoring Practice Metrics

First, many practices may not even notice changes because they are not monitoring metrics. As you know, I’m a huge proponent of tracking practice benchmarks.

As the saying goes, what gets monitored gets managed, and what gets managed gets improved. If you don’t know what is normal for your practice, or how you are trending, it will be very difficult to know if things are changing. Are you measuring your schedule fill rate? Do you track patient cancellations? We often go by “feel” on how busy we are, which can give us false information. You may “feel” busy but have less patients on the books. This can lead to working harder, not smarter.

Time to Start Tracking if You Aren’t Already

If you’re not tracking metrics and aren’t sure how your practice is doing, now is the time to start. How full is your schedule? Are you booking out as far as you used to, or are there more openings? Have you changed anything recently in your practice (dropped an insurance plan, stopped evening or weekend hours)? Have you added an associate and patients now have more opportunities to be seen?

First, identify what is happening in your practice and then look for a reason. Can’t find one? Let’s drill deeper!

Investigate Your Recall System for Gaps

If you’ve noticed you aren’t quite as busy as you have been in the past, and you haven’t changed anything, the first thing I’d recommend looking at is your recall system. Many of us are sending patients reminders when it’s time to schedule their next appointment, which is great.

However, technology is not always perfect or reliable. I’ve had a few friends notice a huge drop off in their schedule, and rather than panic, they did some digging. What did they find? Their recall system was turned off, and for months, no text or email reminders were going out!

It wasn’t that patients were choosing to go elsewhere, they just didn’t know it was time to come in. With a quick change of a setting, the recalls went out again and the schedule filled back in. Whew! However, if they hadn’t monitored correctly, there could have been serious repercussions in the practice.

Audit Practice Spending to Prevent Revenue Leaks

What else can you do if you notice a big slow-down in your practice? It’s a great time to make sure you are running as efficiently as possible. Many of us just look at our gross revenue, or the dollars that come in. We rarely spend time auditing our spending and looking at our expenditures. If we have less money coming in, is there a way to monitor or change our spending habits in the practice?

Areas to Review for Potential Savings

What are some areas where we can save money, or make sure we are spending correctly? When was the last time you did a price analysis for your frames, lenses and contact lenses? Prices have certainly gone up, and it can be easy to miss small increases if we don’t have the time to analyze.

Another place to look is your frame bills—many companies have added a tariff surcharge (under a variety of names). If you are just looking at the frame pricing, and not the whole invoice, you may miss this. With a less-than-full schedule, we often are looking for ways to keep our staff busy, and this is a great one. Have them do a pricing comparison and make sure we are accounting for any increases we may have missed.

Utilize Staff with Productive Outreach Projects

Speaking of staff, it can be frustrating to see a team without things to do. When we are cranking with a good patient flow, everyone tends to find ways to keep busy. When that slows down, it can be hard for those who aren’t as good at self-starting to identify good projects.

One of my favorite things to do to both utilize staff time and get patients scheduled is what I like to call “dialing for dollars.” We have already identified that our practice has a robust recall system and that our recalls are going out correctly. What about those patients who just don’t respond?

Run a report of all patients who are due for appointments, split the lists up and have your staff reach out the old-fashioned way. It can be easy to ignore or delete a text message or email (or even think, “I’ll get to it later”), but it’s next to impossible to do that with a person on the phone.

We found that people tended to schedule their appointments if we were able to reach them, or we could clean up our patient system and inactivate those who have moved away, gone elsewhere, etc. Not only does it fill your appointment schedule with the patients you want to see, it allows you to tighten up your recall and patient communication.

Refresh and Ramp Up Your Marketing Efforts

This is also a great time to work on your marketing. Haven’t had to market at all? Now is the time!

Marketing now looks a lot different than it did many years ago. I am not one for reinventing the wheel, so I love to use technology for this.

ChatGPT is a fantastic way to brainstorm marketing ideas, get a rough draft and even a timeline of what and when to post and send. Struggling for ideas for your social media? Identify what you are trying to accomplish, be very specific in your query and artificial intelligence can really help.

I’ve used ChatGPT to help me plan a social media posting calendar, including what taglines to use, what type of picture to use, what caption to use and how often to post. This could even be a perfect time to have a trunk show, and ChatGPT can be used for a four- to six-week marketing plan.

Capitalize on Downtime to Fine-Tune Your Practice

It is natural for practices to go through peaks and valleys in patient flow and revenue generating. Add an always-changing political and economic climate, and it can be easy to worry and panic when things slow down.

I like to look at this downtime as the perfect time to work more ON the practice, instead of IN the practice. This is a perfect time to identify KPIs and metrics you want to track, work on your recall systems, make sure you are operating at peak efficiency and profitability and fine tune your marketing strategy.

Read more about tracking and improving practice metrics in Independent Strong

Read more success stories in Review of Optometric Business