The next best thing to cloning
It’s incredible how many ways the world has changed since the pandemic.
For those of us in eye care practices, the shortage of qualified, willing people to work in our offices has been maybe the hardest part to manage. Many of us have turned to hiring people with no medical office experience. “Hire for attitude, train for skills” has always been our mantra, but we don’t even have a choice anymore to hire for skills.
Training new people in the many tasks of a qualified ophthalmic technician requires a significant investment of time. Yes, it helps to start with someone who is compassionate, intelligent and motivated, but a great personality doesn’t help you applanate a cornea. As I’ve blogged before, my own practice has greatly benefited from hiring college graduates taking a 1- or 2-year “gap” before medical, nursing, PA or optometry school. These kids are fast learners and generally have a great attitude, but training one new person still requires the time of at least one other experienced employee, and that trainer is taken offline for at least some period of time to do the training. In our office, it takes at least 1 week for an inexperienced person to be cut loose even with minimal technical skills, like operating an automated visual field machine. One or 2 months of experience are generally needed before applanation is considered reliable, and up to 3 months for basic tech refraction skills.
One tool that many practices have found to be useful for technician training is Alchemy Vision. Co-founded by ophthalmologist Mitchell Schultz, who practices in Southern California, Alchemy recognizes the importance of standardizing staff training and consists of an elegant subscription service in which practices can assign their clinical staff a series of training modules, qualifying them to help manage patients. It offers beginner, intermediate and advanced tracks and can grow with a practice. There are other tech training resources available online, such as eyetechtraining.com and eyetec.net, but Alchemy’s appeal is how current and relevant both the interface and the training are. It’s a solution every busy practice might consider.
To be sure, there’s no substitute for one-on-one training, which also instills in a new employee your practice’s culture — that intangible character of your relationship with patients. Culture, we’ve learned, is more important than anything. But culture doesn’t measure IOP. Trained technicians do. And when it comes to bringing quality new people on board quickly, we’ll take any help we can get.
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