If you run an optometry practice, you have to worry about your patients’ eye health and, on top of that, manage resources, improve productivity, and ensure profitability. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential factors to consider when analyzing your practice.

By monitoring KPIs, one can assess where their practice is lacking, what needs to be improved, and what redundancies need to be addressed. This leads towards a more growth-oriented optometry practice and ensures a patient-centric model of operation.

Patient Wait Time

When it comes to sight, patients get very anxious, as it is the sense we most rely on. Longer waiting times can exacerbate a patient’s anxiety and make them frustrated, leading to an unsatisfactory visit to their practice. More importantly, it hinders patients from getting the care they need, especially those requiring emergency treatment.

Reducing patient wait times is perhaps the simplest way to improve patient experience. Additionally, it helps to improve another KPI, patient satisfaction, improving patient retention. An excellent strategy to reduce patient wait times would be to adopt a patient portal where an optometrist can gather information on their patients, in turn, reducing wait times before their appointment.

Patient Follow-up Rate

This performance metric deals with patient care after a prescribed treatment by the optometrist. These can include simple procedures like examining patients, prescribing glasses or medication, or complicated procedures like performing tests to diagnose rare eye diseases and post-surgical care.

An optometrist may have to perform multiple procedures if a prescribed treatment doesn’t work or if a disease progresses. By analyzing the cases with an increased follow-up rate, treatment becomes streamlined for similar cases, whereby the patient’s needs are met promptly.

From a business point of view, a patient is more likely to revisit if their needs are met proactively. Hence, using multiple communication channels such as emails, texts, and surveys may determine the best course of action for a patient’s ailments.

Missed Appointments

A patient can miss their appointment for many reasons such as financial troubles, transportation issues, or just plain old forgetfulness. However, they do not know the impact of their missed appointment. Other than a practice missing out on opportunity costs, resources can be diverted to taking care of patients in their stead.

The onus falls on an optometrist to check in with their patients before their appointments and confirm their availability. This can also be an excellent opportunity to gain valuable feedback from the patient to seek a reason for their missed appointment. It can point out deficiencies in your practice that may need improvement.

There are many more KPIs one can analyze in their optometry practice to make it grow even further, but the ones mentioned above are perhaps a good starting point that provides value to both patients and doctors.