NEW YORK—At some point throughout your work day, it’s likely that you’re going to get stuck waiting for a late patient to arrive. While late patients aren’t good for your schedule, during a busy day it can sometimes be a sigh of relief when you get a few extra minutes to yourself. In many cases, you’ll take this time to check your phone, hop on Facebook, or catch up on daily news.
If you get frustrated at the time wasted when patients show up late for appointments, you’re not alone. That’s why we came up with a list of 10 productive things you can do with the few minutes you have in between patients.
Best Uses of Time While You Wait for Late Patients
- Visit Your Dispensary
Take a few minutes to step into your dispensary and look at your frame boards as if you were a patient. Is the dispensary area clean and bright? Are your frames organized in a way that makes sense? Take the time to come up with two or three ideas to enhance the look of your dispensary to generate more sales.
- Get Ahead on Checking Benefits
While this may not typically be your responsibility, it’s a good opportunity to help out your front desk staff to get ahead on checking patient eligibility and benefits. Not only will your team appreciate your help but you’ll gain more insight into any problems they face when doing this daily task.
- Put a Stopwatch on Your Workflow
Getting patients through your office quickly is an important part of maintaining a steady workflow. Make your way through your office as a patient, or shadow a patient to measure how long the patient spends in each area of your office. You could gain greater insight into the bottlenecks of your workflow and how to avoid them in the future.
- Reward Your Hard-Working Team
Employee recognition is a great way to boost morale and enhance the culture of your practice. And on your busiest days, it might not be something you make extra time for. So, when you have a few extra minutes, visit one of your team members and be specific about something you appreciate about them and their role in the practice. Check out this list of low-cost ideas to reward your team.
- Revisit Your Policy for Late and No-Show Patients
If your practice has been hit extra hard with late and no-show patients it might be time to revisit your policy on this moving forward. Do you currently have a policy in place? It can sometimes be hard to enforce, but a policy that rewards punctual patients or gives a payment penalty for not showing up for scheduled appointments could help get more patients into your office on time.
- Assess Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing your practice is an important part of generating patient growth. Take a look at the goals and strategies you set out at the beginning of the year. Are you still on track? If not, nail down three things you can accomplish in the next week to get your marketing plan back on track.
- Sell Your Fax Machine
Do you still have a fax machine lying around your office? What for? With online ordering solutions and modern EHR software, just about every transaction can take place over secure connections on the internet.
- Review Practice Performance
One of the most important things that many business owners don’t spend enough time on is reviewing performance. You should consistently be reviewing different performance measures for your practice. This could be things like month-over-month revenue, new patients generated, chair costs, inventory turn rate, and so much more. For more ideas on what to measure, download the eBook, 8 Benchmarks Every Eyecare Practice Should Monitor.
- Help Your Billing Department
Just like earlier when we suggested to help pull patient eligibility and benefits for upcoming patients, you could help your biller tackle claim rejections or denials. It’s good to have the knowledge of the processes your staff goes through to perform daily tasks so that if your biller were to ever leave you, or take a vacation, you’d have the knowledge to keep up in the meantime.
- Read an E-Book
Use your extra few minutes to brush up on industry news or a topic you want to learn more about. Generally, online eBooks are pretty short in nature and may take about 10 minutes to read. Check out this library of optometry E-Books to find a free resource that interests you.