CLINICAL

  diversify your portfolio

Don’t Be a Secret

Diversify your referral resources to include other doctors

JEFFRY D. GERSON, O.D., F.A.A.O.

Are you the best-kept secret in town or even within your office? If you are, that may not be a good thing.

Not only do you want potential patients to know about you and your practice, but you should also want other doctors, such as fellow optometrists, ophthalmologists and primary care doctors, to know what you can do for their patients. Each of us possesses a skill that we do differently or better than others around us. Why not share it?

Partnering

If there is a necessary aspect of care that you don’t particularly enjoy providing or excel at, find a partner or associate within your practice or someone outside your practice who enjoys and has mastered delivering that care.

I, personally, like having the option of referring to other O.D.s. This can create a nice synergistic relationship between practices that may have seen each other as competition, but don’t really need to.

Networking

The flip side of the above is letting others in the healthcare community know what you enjoy doing and what you feel you are really good at. I enjoy helping people who have medical retina problems, such as AMD, and I have let other healthcare providers know this by sending letters that detail my optometric skills in their discipline, and I include my CV.

For example, my letters to rheumatologists are comprised of my awareness of the importance of routine screenings for patients taking hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil, sanofi-aventis) — I include the abstract from “Revised Recommendations on Screening for Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine Retinopathy” from the February 2011 issue of Ophthalmology — and that I have an OCT, so they feel confident sending me their patients. Similarly, the letters I send to endocrinologists detail the importance of eyecare appointments for diabetic patients and that I have an OCT.

An additional strategy for diversifying your referral resources is to contact some well-known primary care doctors in your area — look at your patient records — and offer to take them to lunch, so you can explain your value. Also, you could offer to conduct in-office seminars for their patients who complain of dry eyes and other ocular ailments.

Another group that you may not think of telling about what you do is plastic surgeons. If they perform eyelid surgeries, they will likely need somebody to conduct a visual field exam to evaluate medical necessity for the procedure. You can be that resource.

The rewards

Not only will partnering and networking help grow the medical portion of your practice, it will also likely help your practice financially in a number of ways.

For example, in addition to getting to see “medical” patients, many of those “medical” patients will ultimately need glasses or contact lenses. Further, once you take care of them, they will tell others and be an additional referral source. In fact, encourage them to tell others about the care you have provided. Let them be your marketers.

Some things should be kept a secret, but your ability to make patients happy is not one of them. Get the word out and prosper. OM

DR. GERSON PRACTICES AT GRIN EYECARE IN OLATHE, KAN., A FULL-SCOPE COMBINED O.D./M.D. PRACTICE. E-MAIL HIM AT JGERSON@HOTMAIL.COM TO COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE, E-MAIL OPTOMETRICMANAGEMENT@GMAIL.COM.