Review has put together some
tips on how to stretch bucks, pinch pennies and pull together as a team
to ride out the rest of the recession.
If you haven't gone paperless yet, the days of handheld patient charts—to jot down your patient's glaucoma progress, contact lens history or a reminder about Little Johnny’s birthday—may soon be a memory.
The health care system in the United States is preparing for one of the biggest challenges it has faced in decades. No, not socialized medicine or universal health care, but the overwhelming task of transitioning from the ICD-9 coding system to the ICD-10 system. The price tag? An estimated $83,290 for a small (i.e., three-doctor) practice. The total cost for the entire U.S. health care system? $1.64 billion.
Online ratings were once isolated to reviewing restaurants and hotels. Not anymore. The “anything goes” environment of online ratings encourages patients to post any and all comments about their doctors. In fact, there’s a decent chance that you and your clinic are already rated on a Web site such as Yelp.com, Insiderpages.com or Kudzu.com. Simply search for your name or clinic in Google and you may find one or more of these rating Web sites in the search results. Like it or not, the proliferation of Web sites that rate doctors, including optometrists, can change how patients find ...
Everywhere you look, you see news about a dreary economy. You’re pinching every penny, and you’re trying to make ends that seem further and further away still meet. To top it off, your practice is showing some signs of age—faded paint, dingy lights, and, is that point-of-purchase (POP) display from the summer collection three years ago? You might think that now is not the best time to allot funds for an office redesign—and you’re right. Now is not the time for a full-scale, top-to-bottom overhaul of everything in your practice. Instead, set a budget and a list of priorities, and ...
I know I’m in the minority when I tell other O.D.s that I like working at Wal-Mart. I’m not crazy. Hear me out. Previous articles in Review of Optometry have focused on optometrists who were in corporate optometry but yearned for private practice. I have nothing against private practice. I’m merely suggesting that optometry students and practitioners should question whether solo private practice is the best and only option for them. In other words, choose what’s right for you. For me, for now, that’s inside “the largest retailer in the world.”