Setting Practice Goals

Dr. Gustafon:
So one of the things I'm concentrating on in my practice is bringing new patients into the office. I track how many established patients and new patients I see each day, and I aggregate that data, look at it for trends over the month and the year. And ideally, I'd like to have about 30% to 35% new patients, but that number really changed during COVID. During COVID, we were down to about 14% new patients. So I feel really great about my established patients wanting to come back to see me, but that means I'm not reaching a new audience. So I'm really focusing on driving new patients to the practice and tracking that. Currently, I'm at 20% new patients, so I have been able to move the needle on that.

Dr. Gustafon:
One of the things I'm doing is really trying to empower my optical staff. I want them to be empowered to schedule patients for what they need, when they need it. When a new patient calls my office with a red eye or flashes and floaters, to me that's such a great opportunity to make an impact on that patient and be there for them in their time of need. And I really want to make that a seamless experience. So I'm really working with my opticians to help them be strong at triaging calls, knowing when to schedule that patient so it minimally disrupts my schedule for my other scheduled patients, but gets that patient in and hopefully captures that patient so that they'll become a member of my practice as well.

Dr. Wilson:
So the two offices I have, one's very established. I've had it for almost 25 years. And the second office is a smaller office and it's newer. So there are two different strategies completely, and we can't apply one to both offices because they're so different. So the older established practice, we have plenty of patients and we're always booked, and that's a nice problem to have. So our growth strategy for that office is to increase dollar per patient value. We can't see any more bodies than we see, but we can make them more valuable. So we do that through contact lens fittings, medical testing, things like that. So that's one of our growth strategies for our established office. More of that brings in more dollar per patient. The other office, we have a problem of no one knows we're there. So that's a huge different growth strategy. So that's our strategy is we're trying to get our name out there, to get known and let them know that we have some very high-tech things and we can do high-end eye care.

Dr. Aleman-Moheeputh:
So as everybody, we started the new year with new resolutions and are personal. And I also do the same thing in my business. So I started the new year, 2024, personally saying I want to spend more time with family and friends. And in my business, I had a business growth plan to increase my revenue by 30%. And in that plan... And one thing why we don't falter with resolutions is because we don't develop a plan to implement it. Number one was to increase the services that we're doing in our office, so maximizing the dollars per patient. And the other one was to increase the number of new patients that we are seeing.