Are you offering the option of contact lenses to as many patients as possible? It looks like most patients still begin wearing contact lenses after bringing the subject up themselves with their eye doctor, according to Jobson Optical Research’s 2012 Contact Lens Insight Survey. Some 75.8 percent of survey respondents say they asked their doctor for contact lenses, while just 18.6 percent say their eye doctor was the one who recommended that they try contact lenses.
This information is astounding. Three out of four patients had to ask the eye doctor for contact lenses. Only one in five had the eye doctor recommend contact lenses. Those numbers are skewed in a very dramatic way. Eye doctors need to step up and start recommending contact lenses.
There are several techniques to help the doctor increase the contact lens side of the practice. The most effective approach is the one that follows the EASE study. Read the article in Review of Optometric Business on this topic, “Once They Try It …They Like It” by Leslie Gallagher, OD, FAAO.
Your assignment this week is to read the “Once They Try It …They Like It” article, then create a working plan to increase the number of contact lens patients in the practice. Your plan could be as simple as recommending contact lenses to more patients or as sophisticated as putting single-use contact lenses on patients going from the exam room into the optical as described in “Once They Try It …They Like It.”
Don’t forget to offer single-use contact lenses to your existing contact lens wearing patients. There may be times in their lives when single-use contact lenses make sense. Those patients may purchase monthly or weekly lenses in addition to single-use contact lenses from you.
Let’s change those original numbers so that three out of four patients had the doctor recommend contact lenses. It’s good for the patients and good for the practice.
