WHEN IT COMES to prescribing and selling contact lenses it seems we have gone backwards in time. We are chasing rebates, lower cost of goods, logging into multiple platforms, doing double data entry, or worse, having our patient enter their own information into a portal, all while fearing the patient will go buy online.
Take a moment to look at your contact lens practice wholistically and really understand your numbers. Look at your last 50 patients and determine the outcome of their visit. Even if your capture rate is 90% and your annual supply rate is 50% that means there is still a good number of patients you are not servicing, and someone else will if you don’t.
And if a patient doesn’t want to order from us, we go on defense, hand them a printed quote and a copy of their Rx to fulfill elsewhere. This leaves us with our heads hanging low because we know we’re cheaper and can better service them and better monitor their eye health.
If you have not looked at what your team is doing for CL patients then make this the month you change your process. When evaluating this process count the clicks, the steps and the multiple different user experiences your team is utilizing and providing to your patients and explore the different user experiences out there.
First look at it from your patient’s point of view. Does it create too much friction or is it a seamless experience like the one we have all come to love from Amazon? Do they have to remember a password, do they have to search for their own contacts, do they have to put in their script, is there a verification process before their order is shipped, do they have to remember a URL?
Creating too much friction makes or breaks the patient experience and either sends them to order from somewhere else or keeps them ordering and coming back to see you.
Advertisement
Next look at it from your team’s point of view. Are they still having patients come back to pick up lenses, are they still taking calls to place orders for patients, are they logging into multiple sites to place an order, are they wasting time entering data not synced with your EMR system? Having one system to place and track orders and automatically send reminders to patients has become more important than ever.
At Dr. Contact Lens, we have seen that 38% of customer orders come in between 5pm and 9am with another 27% between 11:30am and 1:30pm. Allowing patients to order from you at lunch, at night, and on weekends frees up your phones for appointments, and consolidating ordering makes it easy to track metrics. Giving patients a way to easily self-service and get the perks of doing business with us while reducing data entry errors and staff time has rewarded our practice with more business.
When you start looking at things with the patient’s full experience in mind you may be surprised at the results. This cannot be about us. It must be about the patient experience in order to continue to compete. By investing in your practice through technology you are investing in your patients, their eye health, and the health of your practice and our industry.
drcontactlens.com
