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By Chris Cheyne, OD
Nov. 4, 2020
Your practice’s key metrics are a bellwether for how well you are serving patients and how well you are boosting profitability. My practice has found dashboard management technology that ensures we always know where we stand with our most important metrics. This helps us to both set and meet our goals, enabling our continued success.
Measurement Made Easy
We started using EDGEPro in 2015 to help us simplify the process of tracking our practice numbers. The ability to quickly and easily track metrics touches nearly all aspects of our practice.
For example, we use score-boarding, powered by EDGEPro, for our opticians as a valuable way to help them learn from each other how to be most effective in working with patients. Metrics tracking via dashboard management technology also makes it easy to see our best-selling frames for a particular time period. This is helpful information for us to have before talking to reps about potential purchases for our frame board. We now know exactly which frames to keep on our board and which to phase out.
In addition, our EDGEPro system helps us determine the most profitable pricing on our frames. First, we use the technology to determine our best-selling frames, then we bump the price minimally on one or two lines, and finally track how the slightly-higher-priced frames sell. If those frames still sell at the same frequency, we bump the price up again. We continue doing this until we find our patients’ threshold price to buy the frames.
Tracking revenue-per-patient and breaking it down by doctor and/or optician is helpful, too. We like being able to compare month-to-month metrics in staff and overall practice performance to see how we are trending.
Effectively Identify the Biggest Growth Opportunities
There are many metrics categories within EDEGPro which you can use to determine the most profitable goals to set. The technology identifies which metrics have the biggest opportunity for future growth. For example, it will show that if you improve capture rate just X percent you would grow X dollars versus the same percentage increase for another metric, which would yield a lower dollar amount. This really clarifies what to work on first.
Lead Your Staff to Greatness
Careful tracking of metrics is a powerful management tool. Our optical staff always knows exactly how they are doing in their performance compared with peers, and how the optical as a whole is performing. My practice manager and I look at the practice metrics all the time with an eye toward helping our team do even better.
We share metrics on eyewear capture rate and other essential numbers, such as capture rate for lens add-ons like AR, with opticians – mainly to get them talking about how they are approaching eyewear conversations with patients. In the course of those discussions, we often find that one optician is describing a particular kind of eyewear or lens treatment in a way that resonates better with patients, while the other opticians are approaching the same conversation with patients in a less effective way.
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Many times one optician will be highest in capture rate on one metric, like Transitions, but will be low or lowest on another metric, like average frame sale. The opticians can then share ideas with each other based on the area in which each is strongest. The peer-to-peer learning this facilitates creates better service to patients and stronger optical profitability.
See How You’re Faring In a Crisis
The COVID-19 crisis, with practice closures in the spring, put a strain on most practices, including ours. Our key metrics during that time, and immediately after, were much altered from what they usually would be, but they still gave a sense of how well our practice recovery was going.
It’s been particularly helpful during this recovery period to see the steady improvement of our eyewear capture rate and our per-patient revenue. It also has been great seeing how our contact sales are going with the ability to break down comparisons among different brands and specific time periods. The environment we are currently in has been challenging, but as our metrics attest, we are making it through and continuing to gain strength.
The key to our recovery and long-term growth is knowing precisely where we are strongest and where we could use a performance boost. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and EDGEPro is great at making complicated numbers–that we often overlook–become obvious and primed for growth.
Chris Cheyne, OD, is the CEO of Cheyne Eye Center in Granbury, Texas. To contact him: chrisdcheyne@gmail.com
