NEW YORK—2018 is the year to take your eyecare practice to the next level. But, making big decisions for your business doesn’t happen overnight. Now is the best time to take a critical look at your practice to prioritize the changes you want to make in the coming year. What is it that might be holding your practice back from innovation and increased profits? Let’s look at five areas that the best eyecare practices are looking to make improvements on in the coming year. Here are 5 things to put a stop to in your practice:

Letting Fear Get in The Way of Growth

Fear of change is a common feeling for many business owners. We are creatures of habit and it’s comfortable to get into a routine of doing things. But, the fear of change can be one of the biggest things hindering your eyecare practice’s growth. The business decisions that you make for your practice will impact the future of your business and your ability to keep up with your competition and industry changes.

Selling Before Educating

These days patients have so many options for purchasing their frames and contact lenses, which can make sales in your practice even more challenging. Understanding the value and quality of your practice, and products will help you educate your patients on why purchasing products from you is just as convenient, cost-effective and more valuable than purchasing from somewhere else online. But if you and your staff aren’t well-versed on your products value prop, it will be hard to educate patients on the value.

Avoiding Reporting and Analytics

Data is becoming more and more important. And as a busy OD seeing patients day in and day out it can be hard to find the time to focus on the numbers. Your business and software systems are hosts to tons of data points on your patients and the performance of your business. Being able to closely monitor things like your claim denial rate, chair costs, revenue per staff hour and optical capture rates will help you make better business decisions for your eyecare practice moving forward.

Putting Up With Duplicate Data Entry

With a busy schedule, the last thing you and your staff needs is to be stuck behind a computer screen. Using a software system that hinders your workflow by requiring duplicate data entry and unnecessary clicking will hurt both staff and patient satisfaction. Excess clicking and data entry only lends itself to human error. Make sure that your office is equipped with software solutions that eliminate duplicate data entry and speed up your workflow across all areas of your eyecare practice.

Budgeting Time and Money on IT Consultants

The days of worrying about keeping up with a server in your eyecare practice are over. Maintaining a server is expensive and time consuming when there are cloud-based software vendors out there that can manage it for you all included in the cost of the software system. On top of not having to manage and secure a server in your practice, cloud-based systems have more frequent updates that happen seamlessly for your practice without time taken away from you and your patients.