There has been a huge increase in the number of children and young adults who we see for eye exams daily. With this increase, I have found that there are three categories of patient parents, and all of them require a certain style of approach. Learning to communicate well with the different parenting styles may be difficult, but will make your day to day in the clinic much easier and more pleasant.

A new, exciting and "radical" way of establishing office efficiency is by allowing the doctor(s) to delegate refraction duties to scribes and technicians. This allows the doctors to dedicate more personal "one on one" time with the patient thus increasing the quality of care, provides the patient with a more personalized experience, and also allows the doctor(s) to increase the number of patients seen per day, which nets an increase in office revenue.

In my last article, I talked about the phenomenon of individuals in a particular business (in this case, opticianry) relying on statistical analyses, market research, and personal experience opinion to form an opinion about patient wants and needs. It wasn’t as analytical as I make it sound. Instead, I touched on the idea of opticians conducting market research of their own—asking their very own patients about their wants, needs, and desires when choosing a pair of glasses. It’s very easy, after all, to make assumptions about our patients—what they want, need, and why they make the choices they do—but it’s also just as easy to ask them themselves why they make these choices. In the spirit of taking my own advice, I decided to do some research of my own, and talk to a real-life eyeglasses wearer about what makes her tick.