As ophthalmology continues to adjust to a changing world, we are all looking for new methods of serving our patients, improving outcomes, and growing our businesses through elective services and treatments. At Vance Thompson Vision (VTV), a central area where we have begun to invest our time, money, and attention is in treating dry eye disease.

Building out your dry eye treatment workflow is a valuable way to improve the lives of your current patients, reach new patients, improve surgical outcomes, and grow the bottom line of your business.

One reason it is surprising more practices don’t create and sustain a robust dry eye program is the multi-faceted benefits it provides to both patients and doctors. Consider:

• Without marketing at all, hundreds of patients each year pass through your practice who will greatly benefit from treatments that relieve their dry eye. Estimates suggest that more than 40 million adults in the United States suffer from dry eye disease—these people are already in your office, waiting for you to help them!
• That number of dry eye patients is rapidly growing each year. In fact, we believe the next 20 years will see a very rapid growth in the market for dry eye treatments.
• Treating dry eye causes in patients dramatically improves patient satisfaction and improves our surgical outcomes in many other areas, such as cataract and LASIK surgery. For this reason, we continue to increase our focus on treating dry eye before proceeding with many types of surgery.
• As Medicare and private insurer payments continue to be cut, adding elective streams of income to your practice is a valuable way to diversify the practice portfolio.
• Finally, dry eye treatments offer meaningful relief for patients. At VTV, we are continually surprised by how passionate our patients are about the dry eye relief we can offer them to a tremendous daily frustration.

Dry eye is an exciting and innovative field, with new treatments and technologies emerging every year. At VTV, we are always working to stay informed and on the cutting-edge of technology, but our focus is primarily on effective treatments; the best, leading technologies that can deliver for our patients.

Here is how we were able to incorporate this offering into our busy practice.

Focus on operations

Once we decided to grow and promote our dry eye program, we shifted quickly into an operational focus for how to manage and fit the program into our already-busy schedule. Like many of you, our time with patients is precious. Dry eye education and treatment is a worthwhile and necessary use of this precious time.

To operationalize our dry eye program, we took a number of important steps as a practice. These steps helped us make decisions with our doctors around treatments, train our staff, and prepare education and design the experience for our patients.

1. Nomograms for treatment. Our nomogram at VTV is a three-part process: clinical indicators, treatment options, and engagement. Together, these help us diagnose, treat, and follow up with all our dry eye patients. We match technologies and treatments with symptoms and severity to give our doctors and staff clear guidance for how we will treat patients. This preparation work is essential to launch a successful program.
2. Staff education. At VTV, we learned long ago that, for us to effectively educate our patients, we needed to heavily invest in education and training for our staff. This provides them with the necessary medical information and scripting on the offering, and it helps them understand the pain patients feel, how we can help, and how dry eye treatment can fit into our overall program. When we help staff understand the “why” of what we do, they become passionate champions of the program.
3. Operational excellence. Of everything we do, this is the “secret sauce” at VTV for our dry eye program. Phones, front desk, website, exam techs, ODs, surgeons, counselors—everyone is trained, on board, and held to a high standard for creating an excellent experience. For dry eye, this has also meant learning to incorporate dry eye screening and treatment into other surgical programs, such as our cataract program.

Key pearls

A dry eye program is not something that can be added overnight to a busy practice. It takes time, focus, and training for your team to get on board, understand the value, learn the symptoms and treatments, and become consistent at delivering results. We’ve learned many lessons at VTV about how to build and sustain our program.

Here are several key pearls from our dry eye experience:

• Many patients suffering from dry eye are either asymptomatic or have symptoms, such as overly teary eyes, that patients would never expect to result from dry eye. We trained our front desk and exam tech teams to offer both lifestyle and SPEED questionnaires to all patients so we can identify patients suffering from dry eye disease, even if they have mild or unusual symptoms. This staff focus has dramatically affected our treatment volumes.
• Educate your referring ODs! We believe in working in close partnership with ODs across our region. To maintain this partnership, we invest heavily in OD education. This has improved both our dry eye treatment volumes and our overall surgical volumes in other programs.
• Build fields in your EHR specifically for dry eye treatment. This serves as a reminder to educate on dry eye and helps the staff share information with surgeons and counselors.
• Incorporate messages about dry eye into the practice’s social media feeds, patient emails, and practice newsletters. Our first social media campaign that focused on dry eye symptoms and treatment resulted in dozens of treatment bookings. Don’t underestimate the pain and frustration your patients are feeling due to dry eye.
• Maintain your education and focus with your staff members every week in short, morning huddles. Remind them of how painful dry eye is and how we can monitor, diagnose, and treat the disease. Share updates on treatments and technologies. This will help sustain and grow your program.
• If you have a very happy patient you’ve treated for dry eye, record a basic video testimony and share it on your website and social media channels. For some patients, there is a stigma attached to dry eye, and seeing the relief and benefit in other patients can dramatically grow your program.

Conclusion

Dry eye disease is a massive, hidden, and growing issue for our patients, and new technologies are helping VTV treat more patients than ever before. OP