How and when do you anticipate patient volume in your practice will return to pre-pandemic numbers?
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Volume back to pre-pandemic level
COVID-19 has caused significant disruption to the delivery of eye care throughout the world.
With many subspecialty ophthalmology and optometry providers, Minnesota Eye Consultants delivers a significant amount of tertiary eye care. We have seven cornea specialists, five glaucoma specialists and three oculoplastic specialists. Even our optometric team is highly specialized, with seven that do complex contact lens fitting and five that do tertiary dry eye.
Even though we saw a significant drop in our patient volumes when we had a governor-requested halt to elective surgery as the state built up reserves of protective equipment, we have rapidly built back up our clinical and surgical eye care volumes. The last 2 weeks of June, just 1 month after the ban on elective surgery was lifted in our state, we are back to the same volume that we had in the same period in 2019. I believe this is because of the high level of pathology found in our typical patient.
This is not to say that it is not without significant extra work and the need for more resources than we used last year. We now need significantly more time to process those patients so that we can reduce the number of patients who are in the office at any given time. We have one to two people at the entrance to our offices doing screening for COVID-19 symptoms, verifying compliance with universal wearing of masks, restricting visitors and nonessential family members, and performing temperature checks. Much of our historical information, history of present illness and medication reconciliation is done by phone the day or evening before the visit or while the patient waits in their car before coming into the building. Our surgery scheduling team is now doing the scheduling and counseling mostly by phone, with the expected phone tag that occurs. The teams spend extra time at the beginning or end of the day and in between patients sanitizing a broader area of surfaces than before the pandemic.
The patient population that we serve has significant eye care needs that cannot be put off for the days when we are over the pandemic, so our staff and patients recognize that this extra work and personal risk have great purpose.
David R. Hardten, MD, is an OSN Cornea/External Disease Board Member.
Volume not returning until there is a vaccine
Needless to say, we are living in unprecedented times. None of us would have expected something like this to affect our practice so radically in the foreseeable future.
Typically, ophthalmology and medical care in general have been insulated and immune from changes in the political and economic climate. But a pandemic such as COVID-19 has no discretion on who and what it impacts.
It is becoming clear to me that until we have either a vaccine readily available and administered to everybody across the globe or herd immunity in which 95% of the population has already contracted COVID-19, we will not be back to the volume of patient care we once had. Although I have some colleagues tell me they are busier than others, I have just as many tell me that they are extremely slow. I think we will go through waves and cycles of different volumes in our practices as COVID-19 continues to spread throughout individual communities.
Unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball, and we have never encountered anything of the sort that lets us predict what the future holds. In my opinion, it is best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best in these types of scenarios. That being said, if and when things return to relatively normal, we can be assured that there will be quite a bit of pent-up demand for our services.
Robert J. Weinstock, MD, is an OSN Technology Board Member.
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