New This Week
Test Your Practice Personality: Relationship- or Performance-Based
Mike Rothschild, OD, and Amir Khoshnevis, OD, discuss how to test to determine your practice personality, and build your practice around it. How you prescribe PALs, for example, may be influenced by what suits your patients’ price points and adaptation needs–versus patient desires for the highest visual performance. This is part of an ROB video series, “Mike and Amir Agree to Agree…and Disagree.” >>READ MORE >>
Contact Lenses
Develop a Specialty in Multifocal Contact Lenses
By Gina M. Wesley, OD, MS, FAAO
Multifocal contact lenses provide youthful vision and freedom. Develop your skills at guiding your presbyopic patients into the multifocal CLs that are right for them. >>READ MORE>>
Marketing
E-Blast Off to Enhanced Communication with Patients
By Steve Vargo, OD
Regular e-mail blasts tell your patients about new products and services and keep your practice top-of-mind. This translates into patients who are continually conscious of your practice and, therefore, are more likely to schedule that next appointment.
>>READ MORE>>
Finance
Practice Transition Team Checklist: Get the Right People On Board
By Robert Schultz
When buying or selling a practice, you need the right people resources in place. Here is a winning-team checklist of the most important team members and the services they should perform.
Optometric Business Innovators
2012 Optometric Business Innovators:
Influencers
Review of Optometric Business and Vision Monday present the 2012 Optometric Business Innovators. For the last six months, ROB has profiled honorees in various categories–business management, optical dispensing, digital media, marketing, the patient experience, influencers and contact lenses. This month: doctors recognized for achievement as “influencer” innovators.
>>READ MORE>>
ROB Fast Fact
How Many Children Spend More than Three Hours Daily Using Digital Media?
Many of your children patients may need computer eyeglasses soon. Nearly half of children spend more than three hours a day using digital media devices such as desktop and laptop computers and electronic tablets and smartphones, according to The Vision Council VisionWatch 2012 Digital Eye Fatigue Report. Among respondents with children living at home, just over half, 51 percent, report their children spend less than three hours daily using digital media devices. An additional 13 percent report their children do not use digital media at all. More children in households with incomes under $60,000 do not use digital media (17 percent).
Click HERE to read more from Review of Optometric Business professional editors Carole Burns, OD, FCOVD, and Mark Wright, OD, FCOVD, on monitoring the vision and eye health of children who spend significant time using digital media devices.
In Brief
OD Excellence Third Annual Conference: July 2013 in San Diego
The OD Excellence National Conference for 2013 will be held in San Diego, Calif., at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel on July 11-13. This year’s focus: Navigate Your Future: Innovate…Motivate…Succeed. The OD Excellence National Conference is intended to bring the leaders in the optometric, optical and ophthalmological community together for dynamic presentations and lively discussions with some of the nation’s most recognized optical industry speakers. >>READ MORE>>
Transitions Optical and VSP Bring Free Services to Needy in San Francisco
Transitions Optical, Inc., in partnership with VSP Vision Care, spent four days (Nov. 6-9) in the San Francisco area with the mobile eyecare clinic “Eyenstein” to provide underserved individuals at local community organizations with free eye exams and, if needed, prescription eyeglasses. In total, 35 vision screenings and more than 50 eye exams were conducted on-site at two community organizations: Delancey Street Foundation and The Life Learning Academy.
>>READ MORE>>
ROB Poll Results
Advanced Instrumentation Poll: Readers Intend to Invest in OCTs and Digital Retinal Imaging
Asked about the instrumentation they plan to invest in next year, 57 percent of ROB readers say they will invest in advanced instrumentation such as an OCT or digital retinal imaging that will only be used on some patients. Twenty-nine percent say they will purchase additional pre-testing instrumentation to be used on every patient and 14 percent say they will not invest in any new instrumentation next year.
