Local Eye Site recently had the opportunity to interview Carla Mack, O.D., M.B.A., FAAO. Dr. Mack is the Director of Global Medical Affairs Vision Care for Bausch & Lomb (B&L). We discussed B&L’s newest venture, the Center for Patient Insights (CPI).
“The main goal of CPI is to deliver news and patient insight that can help any eye care practitioner better understand their patient, and ultimately provide better vision care for them,” said Dr. Mack. B&L is trying to present something new and different within the industry. CPI is meant to be a reliable, credible resource that provides easily accessible information.
As eye care professionals, we assume that practitioners know and understand their patients’ concerns when it comes to choosing contact lenses. However, it never hurts for practitioners to receive patient feedback from a different perspective. Dr. Mack mentioned that CPI has commissioned a number of patient surveys in order to gauge patient’s understanding of current knowledge and products that exist on the market. Dr. Mack stresses the information is unbiased. Not all of CPI’s content is generated by B&L. “Some of the patient insights are commissioned by B&L and some of it comes from peer review journal articles and other recognized sources such as HPR and Gallup; The information is not meant to be geared towards B&L as product promotion. For example, we just announced results from a 200-person survey showing that 80% of soft toric lens wearers in the U.S. have experienced a rotational recovery issue, such as blurred or fluctuating vision that can happen during normal life activities like lens insertion or rubbing of the eyes. This high statistic demonstrates that, we, as an industry of eye care professionals, must be sure to address rotational recovery with patients and provide soft toric lens options that rapidly return to their resting position.”
At the Center for Patient Insights AOA Launch Event this past June, there was a panel discussion in which Dr. Mack participated. She addressed the question of patient motivation to wear daily disposable contact lenses.It was clear, based on a real-time audience survey, the audience of practitioners believed that convenience is a factor when patients choose their lenses. Dr. Mack commented, “I think convenience is one aspect that appeals to patients but different practitioners have different ways of discussing and recommending lens options; It really depends on where the value lies for the patients. Although convenience is important, the health benefits of a daily disposable lens is another important factor.” Dr. Mack had a similar answer when asked about the cost-effectiveness of lenses. Essentially she said it comes down to value and what your patients look for in a lens. “If their needs are met, they’ve picked the right lens, regardless of price.”
CPI is for optometrists, opticians, general staff and ophthalmologists, “If you have contact lens patients, it is our intent that you will find some information that can be applied to your practice.” The website is not the only tool B&L plans to use to push out valued information. “It’s not so much about promoting the website; It’s about making sure the information is distributed through a number of channels that are accessible to eye care professionals,” Dr. Mack added. Through newsletters, practitioner events and Patient Points, Bausch & Lomb and Center for Patient Insights, hope to partner with eye care practitioners to provide timely patient insights that can help practices achieve great patient outcomes, satisfaction, and vision health.
Joseph Farina is a Local Eye Site “Community Contributor.” Joseph has a B.S.B.A. in Business Management, an A.A.S. in Ophthalmic Science and Technology, and over 20 years of ophthalmicoperations management experience, holding a vice president position for three different multi-state ophthalmic companies. Most recently, he served as president of a consulting company that specializes in services to the eye care professional.
Joseph authored today’s Local Eye Site blog entry, “How is Your Culture Affecting Your Bottom Line?” We hope you enjoy it, and are able to take away some helpful information for managing your eye care practice.
What does the culture at your company say about what it values most? Does your culture produce the type of results you want or need? A culture is simply the way people think and act, and it does produce results. Every practice or organization has a culture, no matter its size. The culture produces the results and the results reinforce the culture.
Is your culture one of patient service, financial performance, employee support, etc.? Think about 3M and its product development, or Proctor and Gamble and its strong marketing culture. For me most recently, it was patient service. With so much competition in eye care, I knew it was the best area in which to focus full efforts in order to produce long term results.
One example that practices and companies use in culture development are employee promotions. Leaders and employees sometimes take them too lightly, but they are a very powerful tool. They affect the persons promoted as well as everyone else around them. Employees share both positive and negative experiences. Think about it. Do the promoted individuals provide a value imprint? They should, because everything these individuals do or say, everywhere they go, leave a valuable impression on everyone else.
Whatever the size of the organization, leaders create and reinforce the culture. An effective culture requires a good leader. This might be the doctor, supervisor, director, manager, or technician. The leader must provide open, honest, and respectful communication; this will supply valuable information for effective cultural development. Is finger-pointing, confusion, denial, and/or procrastination what you are hearing from your culture? Are members saying things like “I did not know that was the number we were trying to achieve? That is not my responsibility. They gave me bad reports. I did not know I got paid to do that also. Did you actually think I could exceed that number? Things will get better. Didn’t you receive that memo?” If this is what you are hearing, your culture is not producing a culture of full performance. Manage your culture or it will manage you.
The greatest management task is always directing people to produce the desired result. To accomplish this, the leader must drive the experiences. Experiences should be 1) realistic, 2) recognizable, 3) results driven, and 4) time sensitive. They must take into consideration the abilities of all employees at all levels of the organization. Take “baby steps” to construct the change you want, and then multiple “baby steps” to produce long term results. Recognizable experiences illustrate that things are different from before. “This is how we do things now.” Results driven experiences are action-oriented. Employees must work from their minds and hearts to take ownership. With more ownership comes focus and change from their empowerment. Time sensitive experiences are actions which individuals can do today, this week, or this month. They are NOT just a “to-do list”. They are clear actions that contribute to the practice or company that all are committed to achieve. Using these concepts, I produced a major culture shift at an eye care organization. “Baby steps” and open communication provided opportunities for employees to take ownership and pride in the work that was accomplished. All issues were time sensitive, and employees believed the results were realistic achievable. Everyone within the organization was involved, and things were done differently than before. This process produced record results with a $2.8M revenue increase, a 62% increase in laboratory productivity, and a 30% improvement in patient/customer service.
In this trying economy, your culture is the single most important component to achieving results through all the employees successfully. Ask yourself these questions:
1. Do we have a business plan, and does everyone understand it?
2. Is everyone committed to achieving it?
3. Does everyone have an opportunity to participate in goal setting?
4. Is the billing/receivables department operating at a high performance level?
5. Are the right dollar amounts being spent in external/internal marketing?
6. Are operational reports prepared properly?
7. Are phones being handled at peak performance?
8. What are our capture rates?
9. Did we get that new appointment?
10. Did we follow up with the patient on their insurance?
11. Was the patient notified of a change in surgery?
12. Was the patient notified of a new date of delivery?
The lists of questions to ask yourself are endless. All answers to these questions come back to culture development. The size of the organization does not matter. The leader sets the expectations by example and communication. Experiences change and reinforce the culture, and the culture produces the results. If you apply these principles in all departments, you will be able to construct or realign the culture you desire, even in this difficult economy.
Recently, Local Eye Site conducted an online survey of eye care professionals looking for feedback on what regimen of drops are being used before, day-of and after cataract surgery. The response from the Local Eye Site community was terrific! We pulled the results into the power point presentation below. Enjoy! Please let us know if there are additional surveys that you would like to see in the future. Thank you.
In the Local Eye Site continuing saga, “Eileen the Eye Care Professional Extraordinaire,” Pearl E. White (The Neighborhood Eye Care Center’s weekly visiting sensational Pharmaceutical Representative) pays Eileen a visit. Pearl is launching her brand new combo drop for glaucoma AND cosmetics…”Prosta-lash”. “Low Pressures…Long Lashes!” Sit back and enjoy the action with Eileen, Pearl and the gang as they learn about the merits of Pearl’s new drop.
One of the early Local Eye Site visions was to create an ongoing animated feature that pokes fun at the idiosyncrasies associated with working in the eye care industry. Since before we even launched Local Eye Site, we always thought there was a great opportunity to take ideas from the LES community and spin them into animated shorts built around a character who works in eye care. Well, we finally did it, and we are proud to introduce eye care’s new mascot: Eileen, TheEye Care Professional Extraordinaire.
Eileen was produced in collaboration with Grey Blackwell, one of the most respected computer animators in that business. Grey lives in the Raleigh, NC area. Since Grey was a friend of Local Eye Site’s, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to work with him. Grey’s work has been featured by ESPN and Mad Magazine just to name a couple of his clients. Grey and Brad McCorkle collaborated on the first script, “The Early Birds” with Jay Brady, who produced Eileen’s catchy theme music and hilarious voices. Brad got the idea for this initial episode after talking to eye care Technicians and Nurses over his years in the industry.
In “The Early Birds” we have fun with the reality that most eye care patients are Senior Citizens, and they have a tendency to show up REALLY early for their appointments because the doctor’s appointment is their social event of the day. Another well known idea (easily related to by all of the eye care medical sales reps out there) is that the parking lot of an eye clinic is not the safest place to hang out. Here is the first episode of “Eileen: Eye Care Professional Extraordinaire”
We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it!
Local Eye Site is proud to introduce our newest service for eye care professionals and employers, the Professional Profile program.
Are you currently looking for employment in eye care?
Do you have a skill-set that would make you a great addition to a company in the eye care industry?
Would you like a platform to tell employers why you are a great catch?
If you answered yes to these questions, then you should submit your professional profile for consideration in TheLES Professional Profile. LES is committed to connecting quality professionals in the eye care industry with available career opportunities. We stand by our commitment toconnectprofessionals bybuildinga strong community andsharingit with our LES followers.
We are launching a new campaign that will introduce qualified professionals to the LES audience of employers. We invite professionals with all backgrounds including clinical, administrative and sales & marketing, to apply. We want to provide you with this new service to help job-seeking registrants overcome the challenges of the job market.
If you are interested in participating, simply send the following to info@localeyesite.com:
Your contact information including name, phone # and email address
The qualities that make you a great catch for eye care employers in 100 words or less
The Local Eye Site community is looking for feedback with regards to the most commonly prescribed regimen of drops pre and post cataract surgery. We have heard your requests for feedback from your peers about how various drops are being prescribed before, the day of, and after cataract surgery. So, in response, Local Eye Site has produced the included survey. We are publishing this in as many places within the eye care community as we can in an effort to build a large “n,” if you will. The survey is brief, so please take a moment and complete this as a service to your peers.
It was supposed to be a relaxing and educational evening.Great food, good wine, and a fantastic speaker with a helpful message.This Continuing Ed event was packed, MDs and ODs mingling in groups, chatting about the industry, nursing their cocktails—two sets of well trained medical professionals interacting on a professional level.
But it didn’t last for long. An Optometrist commented to an Ophthalmologist about her tremendous volume of prescriptions of a certain eye drop. The Ophthalmologist says something about how dangerous it is that she is allowed to prescribe anything. Another Optometrist piles on, and before you knew it, World Wrestling Federation night at the Steak House.Dr. Pain has Dr. Sting in a figure four, Dr. Flair is coming off the top rope with an atomic elbow, someone is crushing a metal chair over Dr. Hulk’s head, and the Doctor with the mask is shouting something about “his turf.”
OK.I’m exaggerating a bit, but the MD/OD turf war continues, and I really do get it.Livelihoods and important questions about how to effectively care for the greatest number of patients, appropriateness of care, scope of practice, etc are at stake.These are not easily answered questions.
But here is the thing, I have spent years working with both groups, and interestingly, my experience is that 95+% of the time, “down in the trenches,” MDs and ODs work very effectively together.They realize that both groups are needed, and they need each other.Most realize that each has their own slice of the market, and peaceful co-existence is the norm.Despite that, however, there is a public and political tug of war over these questions that continue today.
So, where do we go from here?How can we foster cooperation at the National level between these two important organizations?Who and where are the leaders attempting to answer the most important question of all: How will Ophthalmology and Optometry effectively work together for the benefit for the most important group of all?
I’m confident that the Local Eye Site feature, “Search for Candidates” is possibly the most powerful recruiting tool in eye care. I’m really excited about it; can you tell?!
Just under 2,000 eye care job seekers have taken the time to visit LES and complete their registration on the site. Registration is free and friendly, but detailed enough to give us a feel for each seeker’s background in eye care, experience level, certifications, etc. Member practices can then query this database of job seekers by these same criteria. The site returns a message that tells the recruiting member how many professionals in the database fit their search criteria. The recruiting practice then has the option to email everyone in the database returned in the search with comments and their job posting attached. All in less than a minute or two…amazing!
Can you imagine the power of this tool as the database grows and grows? Our participating eye care practices already have the opportunity to email hundreds of Technicians, MDs, ODs, Opticians, Adminstrators, and more announcing their job opportunity with just a few clicks. All of the identified email recipients are targeted based on their experience as well. That’s pro-active recruiting! This beats a resume database hands-down, no question!
