These four steps can help promote a healthier new normal for your practice

It’s July 2021. A sizeable portion of the U.S. has had their COVID-19 vaccinations. Mask wearing and social distancing are no longer seen as necessary. We are finally back to “normal.” But if we are, then why is “normal” in quotes?

Over the last nine months we anticipated that once we were past COVID-19, we’d be living in a new normal. Expectations are that “things will never be the same.” Air travel went through this after 9-11. Now, when we go through the TSA checkpoint, we don’t give a second thought to taking our shoes off or limiting liquids in our carry-on baggage. That’s our new post 9-11 normal.

What will the new post-COVID-19 normal look like?

My prediction is that for many O.D.s, not much will change. It’s unfortunate. From a practice management perspective, the pandemic served up, on a silver platter, many valuable lessons that we should continue even after the pandemic.

With that said, the purpose of this article is to get you to plan to take action steps based on those lessons now. Here are the top four things to do to promote a healthier new business normal.

1 OVER-COMMUNICATE WITH PATIENTS

You told them you were closing, you told them you were reopening and you told them your office was a safe place to visit. You didn’t do that once during the two-to-three months you closed. You did them repeatedly. Pre-COVID-19, your social media channels likely had stale dated content and your website was last refreshed in 2004. Starting now, plan to keep the social media heat turned on high and keep communicating with your patients. There is always something you can talk about!

2 ALWAYS MAINTAIN YOUR PRACTICE AS A SAFE, CLEAN PLACE TO VISIT

Let patients know that. Whether you keep wearing masks or not, your college freshman microbiology lessons have been forever branded in your psyche. Why not continue, to a reasonable degree, the same level of hygiene? Maybe you won’t need it to kill COVID-19, but it’s unlikely it will hurt any business aspect of your practice. I expect the hospitality industry will follow suit and we can often learn some great lessons from them.

3 CONTINUE WITH TELEHEALTH

You embraced telehealth, at least for a few weeks. COVID-19 or no COVID-19, patients who were exposed to any degree of telehealth — from your practice or their cardiologist — liked it. Like you, many patients lead hectic lives and no matter how great the experience is in your practice, they would prefer to visit you from the convenience of their homes. Don’t let the lack of imaging or other technology stop you! You can still talk to and counsel a fair number of patients via telehealth. Similarly, you can certainly expect that online contact lens sales aren’t going anywhere. And if you promoted it during the thick of the pandemic and have since abandoned it, make that an integral part of your new normal.

4 BE FLEXIBLE WITH YOUR APPOINTMENT TEMPLATE

Finally, many of us spaced out appointments and cut capacity by nearly 50%. Yet, I haven’t heard of a single practice that did this and had a commensurate decrease in revenue. What did that tell us, and is the lesson to spend more time with each patient? That may be one lesson, but the bigger one is to recognize that your appointment template should be looked at as a malleable plastic framework, not a rigid, non-negotiable fixed entity. If spacing appointments worked for you, provided more revenue and less stress, and allowed for less labor costs (and higher net), why not experiment pushing it even further? Plan now for what should be a great new era of post COVID-19 practice! OM

More COVID-19-related coverage can be found here. 

DR. GERBER is the president of the Power Practice, a company specializing in making optometrists more profitable. Learn more at powerpractice.com , or call Dr. Gerber at (888) 356-4447.