Enhance Your Contact Lens Strategy

Dr. Gustafon:
Patients don't care what you know until they know that you care. And that just resonates with me so deeply because if patients don't feel like we're invested in them as a human being, I think they're not going to be invested in us. It's so important that our patients have a great experience when they come into our offices. That's all of our goals to provide each patient with a great experience. And at the end of the day, I really want to wow my patients, with number one, my sparkling personality. Number two, my excellent clinical skills, and number three, my technology. But I know intellectually at the end of the day, what reflects upon me the most is the product the patient interacts with every day. So if they're unhappy with their glasses, if they're unhappy with their contact lenses, it would follow in my mind that they'll likely be unhappy with me.

Dr. Gustafon:
So I view the products I recommend as my calling card. And to that end, I have always made daily disposables a priority in my practice. I wear daily disposables. I think every patient deserves to try daily disposables. I very much shied away from daily disposables as a new practitioner 23 years ago, which was a huge miss on my part. Now my practice is about 70 to 75% single-use daily lenses, and I think that provides that best Patient Experience. The other thing I like to do is a lot of multifocal contact lenses. That technology is heavily underutilized in the marketplace. I practice in a suburb of Minneapolis. I have six offices, optometry other offices within one mile of my office. So I have plenty of competition from very excellent doctors. And that one thing, the multifocal contact lenses, I think can really help separate me from my competition.

Dr. Gustafon:
So that's one thing I like to do. And how I've leveraged the water innovations technology is that's really given me the tools in my toolbox. I need to uncover a patient's true wearing experience. When I started practicing 23 years ago, I think I would ask patients, tell me how things are going with your contacts. And if they said fine, I was like, great, we're good because I didn't have a lot of technology to make a big change in what they had. But when water surface lenses came out, water surface technology really gave me the leverage and leeway to ask more probing questions. So now I like to ask patients two questions. I say, "Tell me how things are going with your contacts?" And that gives me their perception. And then I follow that up and say, "What time of day are your contacts dry?" That gives me their reality.

Dr. Wilson:
What we really focus on at Patient Experience is, number one, they have to have the best visual outcome we can possibly give them. I look at it at two ways, is I look at the practice as being kind of half medically oriented. So we have all the equipment to do that, and we show all of the exams and all the equipment tests in the rooms to each patient, every single time and explain in detail, even if they don't understand, that's okay. But I think the doctor explaining to them in a very technical way, kind of impresses them with their doctor.

Dr. Wilson:
And so they tend to trust and they do, and they'll follow your advice better and they come back because the best thing I can hear in our practice is no one ever told me that before. No one ever showed me that before. That's music to my ears. Then I know we're doing the right thing and they want to come back and they'll tell their friends, "Oh, that doctor did this. He told me that." And that's how we can help grow our practice. The other thing is with water innovation contact lenses, we make that our lens of choice in our office. And to me, it's not a burden switching everybody out of their older lenses into the newer technology. It's an opportunity.