The Jackson rules: The inside scoop to successful premium patient expectations

Knowledge, trust, confidence and flexibility are necessary to work with co-workers, patients and ophthalmology as a whole.

In professional basketball, the “Jordan rules” were team strategies specifically intended to minimize the effectiveness of Michael Jordan, five-time winner of the NBA’s most valuable player award.

In the book The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of One Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, author Sam Smith not only discusses the Jordan rules, but also digs into the mechanics of the business of professional basketball and the personalities that drive decisions. What the book was really about, though, according to Smith, was people with everyday emotions trying to do their highly visible jobs as well as they could and confronting the obstacles of their relationships and their lucrative public professions.

In reality, our profession as premium eye surgeons is no different, requiring a fine balance of knowledge, trust, confidence and flexibility with our team of co-workers, our patients and our profession as a whole. Managing patient expectations will ultimately meet our end goal of having a happy patient and a happy surgeon, all with minimal chair time and maximum profitability. The Jordan rules taught me many lessons, to the point where I created the Jackson rules, which apply to my inside scoop on achieving successful premium patient expectations.

The Jackson rules

1. Avoid the super-ego as the doctor
2. Always work as a team with your staff
3. Listen to your patient
4. Educate yourself, your staff and your patient
5. Adapt and be flexible with management strategies
6. Trust your instincts
7. Maintain confidence
8. Due diligence is mandatory
9. Be realistic
10. Be honest and ethical

Details of the rules

Every patient appreciates a confident surgeon, but crossing over to the super-ego level will create conflict not only with your patient but with key staff members in the surgical and office workspace.

Teamwork is always a winning combination, whether it be in sports or patient care. There have been many catchphrases in the refractive world, such as “capture, match, treat,” and as I have mentioned in previous articles on patient expectations, the phrase “listen, educate, adapt” really applies to patient expectations.

Listen to your patient and referring colleagues to truly understand your patient’s lifestyle and visual needs. Educate yourself on various IOL technologies, for example, to select the best option to achieve these needs with an emmetropic outcome.

Adapt and be flexible in the postoperative period, whether it be managing ocular surface disease, posterior capsular opacification, macular pathology or astigmatism, or just giving a little extra TLC to your premium patient as a premium surgeon. The old adage of under-promise and over-deliver will never get old in the modern-day refractive cataract arena. Always set expectations appropriately, and utilize patient education materials such as LUMA (Eyemaginations) or VueCare Media.

Due diligence is required by both the patient and the surgeon. For example, I had a patient this week who came in only because I offered the ORA System, WaveTec’s intraoperative wavefront aberrometry, and according to his research, it would be useful in his high axial myopia eyes at the time of cataract surgery. Yes, this is the modern-day patient doing due diligence. Likewise, the surgeon should know that even in the absence of an ORA-type device that the Koch adjustment formula can be utilized for high axial length myopia, as discussed in a previous article.

In the end, all surgeons have to wake up in the morning, look at themselves in the mirror and be able to say they were ethical and honest to themselves, their patients and their staff. Mistakes inevitably will occur, but negligence with a harmful outcome defines malpractice. Offer all alternatives to a patient when necessary, and do not be afraid to refer a patient to a colleague of similar expertise in your specialty if it is best for the patient and his or her ultimate visual outcome.

Watch for my next Premium Channel column on preventing a lawsuit in the first place.