Private practice provides an opportunity to treat a variety of different populations and conditions. The reality, however, is that each practice needs to find ways to separate itself from the ever-growing pack. This may be achieved through specialty services, such as vision therapy, dry eye clinics, specialty contact lenses, or other niches, that allow your practice to flourish. What you also must be mindful of is what your patient population looks like relative to the services you provide. This allows you to steer your practice and marketing goals in an appropriate direction.
A great way to start is by mining your own patient numbers through your electric health records (EHRs). This can educate eye care providers or management staff on specific patient numbers that may be pertinent to your practice services. Seeing patients all day, you can get lost in the weeds of patient care, causing you to under- or even overestimate patient numbers, treatments, or services.
Let’s look at my practice demographics as an example.
I like to think I do a fair bit of myopia management within my own practice setting. I see myself as routinely prescribing myopia management therapy, with an emphasis on orthokeratology (ortho-k) as a good option for my younger patients. In my mind, I have a large (and growing) population of young patients with myopia entering this treatment plan. But I found myself wondering, what happens when these patients grow up? Do I stop doing myopia management? Do I shift my focus to building my referral network? To decide, I did some research on my patient numbers.
It turned out I had vastly underestimated how many potential candidates for myopia management, specifically ortho-k, have actually been initiated into the program within my practice. I had the system look for patients between the ages of 6 and 17 years with prescriptions for eyeglasses within a reasonable ortho-k treatment range (ie, sphere power of -4.00 D to plano with less than 1 D of cylinder). I then searched for the number of patients receiving myopia management service within that population. Within that number, I then found how many of those received ortho-k treatment.
In my practice, there have been 250 patients who meet the criteria for ortho-k treatment and have been seen since the practice’s inception, and only 37 have received myopia management treatment. Of those, 23 are being managed with ortho-k. This tells me that while, yes, I am doing more ortho-k relative to other forms of treatment, I have a long way to go in terms of meeting patient needs.
I have only been at the practice 3 years, so I have not had the opportunity to initiate many of these patients. Since there is no date range, I cannot confirm which are patients I have seen and probably have never seen many of them. But the point of mining your EHRs is to learn the number of patients currently in your practice that need myopia management. The priority should not be marketing for additional patients but instead finding new ways to educate our existing patient population first.
Until recently, I may have blown off the idea of mining the EHR for patient data as insignificant or unnecessary. But my recent experience with EHR data mining has opened my eyes to what areas I should be focusing my energy on to continue growth. EHR data mining is a useful tool that can jumpstart or even confirm strategies you are using to make sure the services provided meet the needs of your current and prospective patients.
