Staff Management

Take Your Practice to Optometric Conferences–and Make it Pay Off

By Rajeev K. Raghu, OD, FAAO

Taking your whole staff to optometric conferences is costly, but the gains can be great. The key: Plan your activities well, and discuss specific goals in staff meetings before and after the event.

Optometrists know the value of attending anoptometric conferencepersonally, butwe wonder: Isit worth it to take our whole staff? From my experience, staff-wide participation in professional conferences can solidify new practice management approaches and increase a sense of team among employees.I recently tookmy whole staff of sevento the American Optometric Association’s Optometry’s Meeting in Chicago. The investment has paid off because the trip was planned well, with specific goals that we discussed in meetings before and after the event.

Choose Wide-Ranging Conferences

Shows such as the AOA’s Optometry’s Meeting, SECO and International Vision Expo East and West are better choices for staff-wide participation than smaller conferences because there is something for every employee. Opticians can peruse frame displays in the expo hall and meet with frame vendors while your office manager can accompany you to more business- or financial-oriented sessions. Technicians can look at new instrumentation on display and report back to you about which additional pieces of instrumentation or duplicates of what you already have will speed up patient pre-testing flow and best serve patients. They also can get price quotes from vendors and get details about each piece of instrumentation to help you make a decision once home.

Start with Managers

If you are hesitant to bring your whole staff with you to a major conference, start the first year with your most senior-level employees. If it goes well you can bring a greater number of staff or the whole office next year. You will know it goes well if the senior employees who accompanied you end up teaching the rest of the staff the lessons they learned or increase the number of innovative ideas they bring to the practice.

Decide What You Seek to Accomplish

When I decided to take our office of seven to the AOA conference this year, I had specific reasons for wanting them there.I specifically wanted them tolearn lessonsfrom attendingpara-optometric courses and walking through the AOA exhibit hall. We also planned tovisit a local “premiere” optometry practice for a day, and finally, go to the annual conference of The Power Practice, an optometric consultancy.

Calculate Expense

I spent approximately $6,000 to take my whole staff to Optometry’s Meeting.This included airfare, housing, rental vehicle, meals, registration and other miscellaneous costs.

…And Potential Gains

We found great ways for our practice to save money through the premiere practice visitation. We learned that VSP has a wellness program, so if we note on our claims that the patient has a condition such as diabetes, we will get a $25 additional reimbursement (ie. $25 x 40% of all of our VSP patients). We also learned innovative means of alternative revenue streams such as ortho-K techniques and macular degeneration screenings.The exhibit hall and classes reinvigorated and educated our team. Finally, we had an amazing presentation from the Franklin Covey group regarding the book The Four Disciplines of Execution. This seminar taught our managers and I ways to empower our staff and execute ideas we have been thinking about but never knew how to implement–until now.

Value of Implementation Plans–With Staff Present as Reality Check

The sessions are particularly good at giving you a game plan to carry out your ideas. For instance, regarding ortho-K techniques, the session taught me about the level of instrumentation and supply investment that would be necessary, patient expectations, chair time and potential profitability. In other words, it laid out the details that are sometimes hard to wade through yourself. It gave me a plan for implementation. Having my whole staff with me meant that I could bounce implementation ideas off them to immediately to determine whether a plan would likely work in our office given the realties of our office work flow.

Organize Pre- and Post-Conference Staff Meetings

We had a pre-conference review of goals and objectives for each department. For example, I discussed with my opticians the interactions they might have with frame vendors and with our personalized lens vendor and I talked to my office manager about which business-oriented seminars would be good for her to attend. During the conference, we had daily meetings to review staff experiences in which each staffer explained what they learned and what questions each session had left them with, and finally, we had an implementation meeting after we returned. This post-conference meeting was to go over the lessons learned and questions raised at the conference, and, most importantly, to decide what changes we wanted to make in the office as a result of what we learned.

For example, we talked about the possibility of implementing additional macular degeneration screenings including the staff time and skills this would require and new instrumentation and nutraceuticals I might invest in. My opticians talked to me once back in the office about new frame lines they might like to add, which I saw in person in the exhibit hall.

Don’t Let Staff (or Yourself) Forget Post-Conference Plans

These post-conference meetings are not a one-time event. Since implementing a practice growth strategy like additional macular degeneration testing or shifting frame lines is a long-term effort, we recap our post-conference plans on a monthly basis during regular staff meetings. We reinforce the plan we decided on after the conference and check in with each other to see how much progress is being made.

Extend Learning Past the Conference Center

Often, learning opportunities exist beyond the conference center in the surrounding geographic area of the conference. For example, last year, at International Vision Expo West in Las Vegas, there was a tour of online shoe giant Zappos’s headquarters. A program like the Zappos tour in a sector unrelated to optometry is sometimes even more effective than the optometric-centered topics covered in the conference hall in inspiring innovation to enhance the patient experience. For instance, the Zappos tour highlighted the importance of doing whatever is necessary to ensure happy customers (or patients), a lesson every OD’s staff could use. Sometimes the conference program lists such adjunct opportunities, but other times it will require a little digging. Don’t hesitate to contact conference planners or other attending ODs to discover the opportunities for practice improvement that exist both inside and beyond the conference hall.

Related ROB Articles

Micromanagement Tamer: Know Your Personality

Become Practice CEO: Create an Office that Runs Without You

Deliver Great Service with Staff Policies Based on Your Mission Statement

Rajeev K. Raghu, OD, FAAO, is the owner of The Eye Center at Jackson in Jackson, NJ. To contact him: drraghu@theeyecenteratjackson.com.

To Top
Subscribe Today for Free...
And join more than 35,000 optometric colleagues who have made Review of Optometric Business their daily business advisor.