VISIONOMICS

The Art of Delegation

Training scribes and techs will free you up to grow your business

Visionomics^®, a series of COPE- and ABO-approved business-building courses, will be held at this year’s International Vision Expo East show. They focus on strategies for assessing and maximizing practice profitability. In this series of articles, Eyecare Business—the official trade media partner for Visionomics—features some of the program’s speakers. This month, Neil Gailmard, O.D., MBA, FAAO, discusses his course, “Mastering the Art of Utilizing Scribes, Cross-Training, and Delegation.” Dr. Gailmard is co-founder and president of Prima Eye Group, a doctor alliance company with an emphasis on management consulting. He also owns and operates Gailmard Eye Center in Munster, IN, with his wife, Susan Gailmard, O.D.

Neil Gailmard, O.D., MBA, FAAO

We are—or should be—busy. We’re juggling patients, running a business, and managing a staff. It’s easy to let our myriad daily responsibilities overtake us, and block us from giving enough attention to planning for better practice management and business growth. How can we free up time? By delegating and utilizing scribes to ease our workload.

DELEGATE THIS

Pre- and post-exam delegation is one of the most powerful practice-building strategies there is; yet it is vastly underutilized in optometry. Having a scribe or technician that follows either you or (even better) the patient around is a way to delegate some of your workload, increase office efficiency, and increase patient service.

With scribes and automated testing equipment, exams can still be thorough, but the time you spend on them can be decreased, allowing you to increase patient load and/or spend time on management issues.

Scribes and technicians can be trained to handle: pre-testing, tonometry, acuity, case history, insert trial contact lenses, scribing, and even contact lens ordering, administrative tasks, and optical dispensing.

INCREASED PATIENT LOAD

The economics of eyecare today point to ECPs taking on more patients per day as a major key to increasing revenue. We can do that. We just need to re-engineer how we provide quality eyecare.

I think 25 patients is a good goal per O.D. in a typical workday. That number should include a mixture of comprehensive and short visits. You CAN do it, if you schedule one patient every 15 or 20 minutes. Through proper delegating and farming out responsibilities to scribes, I have found that seeing 25 patients per day is no more work than seeing 10.

BECOME CEO

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I don’t have time to figure out how to institute any of this,” that could be your biggest problem. A reason practices don’t grow is there is not enough time spent on management and leadership.

• Schedule one or more “management” days a week. See the same number of patients in fewer days by delegating more.

• Wander around your practice and observe where problems exist.

There are many excellent doctors who take pride in delegating very little, and that’s OK if that’s what you want. But, if you want to grow, be open-minded to taking small steps. I practice what I preach, and I have found that patients can be very happy with this approach. There is no “assembly line” feeling in my practice and clinical care remains excellent. But I have time to attend to both patients and my business.

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