BLOG: Repositioning to the core of ophthalmology, part 3

How should you get your old patient base back? Patient-to-patient referral still works best. But if your base of seniors has tapered, you need to reintroduce yourself anew to the marketplace. That doesn’t have to be expensive, at least compared with LASIK advertising. A cataract marketing campaign costs about half that of a LASIK campaign, and it’s far easier to get back into cataracts than it is to start refractive surgery.

More good news, of course, is that unlike the typical LASIK patient, your senior patient will likely receive services for years. Indeed, measured over years, the global revenue and profit yield per new senior patient is far higher than for the one-time younger patient.

Here are additional check-offs for your repositioning to-do list:

• Your senior and general practice marketing budget should be about 3% to 5% of the revenue from that part of your practice, year in and year out.
• Make sure a live operator picks up your phone, if at all possible, and use live callers for appointment reminders.
• Get back into health fairs, senior nutrition site screenings, OD outreach and other traditional marketing tactics — you’ll be amazed how many of these niches have been abandoned in recent years. Getting back to them first could be your key to success for the rest of your career.
• Adopt a zero-defects recall system and polish customer service: A great geriatric eye care advertising program will only make wobbly operations fail faster.
• Aim to build your total cataract case volumes to 50+ cases a month, alone or in concert with compatible partners or associates, so you can eventually add a surgical facility.

Ancillary facility income is critical to replace cataract professional fee income.

Unless you’re nearing retirement, general economic cycles will influence your ophthalmic business affairs, both positively and negatively, several more times in the coming years of your career. Each successive cycle will force important decisions about balancing your service mix. Each of these decisions requires a rational fit between broad national market trends, your local conditions, your practice’s economic demands and, as importantly, your professional standards and interests. Weaving these sometimes conflicted threads into a viable practice fabric is at once the most challenging and the most satisfying part of owning an independent practice today.

John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. John is the country’s most-published author on ophthalmology management topics. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement, Cashflow: The Practical Art of Earning More From Your Ophthalmology Practice, The Efficient Ophthalmologist, The Women of Ophthalmology, Legal Issues in Ophthalmology, Ophthalmic Leadership: A Practical Guide for Physicians, Administrators and Teams and a new book, Simple: The Inner Game of Ophthalmic Practice Success. He can be reached at pintoinc@aol.com; website: www.pintoinc.com.