––The busiest times of year leave optometrists and their teams of administrators, receptionists, and assistants feeling overwhelmed. The factors leading to this burnout include relentless appointments, excessive office work, and the pressure of operating an optometry practice.
Another possibility is that your office has some glaring inefficiencies. Last year, a significant number of optometry office workers transitioned to working from home for at least some of each week. This move toward more remote work can cause undue stress if your practice isn’t equipped with the right communication tools.
A mobile app prevents burnout by giving optometrists and their teams the ability to perform many of their essential tasks using their smartphones. An effective mobile app benefits not only staff working remotely, but optometrists who might be traveling to other office locations. Having a mobile app makes it easier to schedule appointments, analyze office data, and market your optometry practice on the go.
This blog post intends to show you specific features within a mobile app that can transform the way your practice handles its communication. As you’ll see, improving communication goes a long way toward preventing burnout in your office. Let’s take a look at what you can do to prevent burnout using a mobile app.
1. Manage your phones
2. Start texting more
3. Schedule appointments
4. Utilize lists
5. Keep track of patients
6. Collaborate with your team
7. Strengthen online marketing
8. Check important metrics
9. Send and receive faxes
10. Control access and settings
1. Manage your phones
Busy phone lines can be a major source of burnout for staff in an optometry office. When the phone is constantly ringing or you find yourself calling patients for much of the day, you’re probably wondering how to cut down on the amount of time you spend on the phone. A mobile app that’s linked to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones makes calling and receiving calls much easier.
With a mobile app, you and your team can check and forward calls from your smartphone. These capacities lighten the load for those working in the office. Instead of having to go into the office to adjust or set up your voicemail or voicemail override, make necessary changes from your mobile app. " I couldn't have been as effective nor efficient without Weave. We, like a lot of offices, had to close down and thanks to Weave I could text everyone, send out email blasts, work from home, answer patients questions and concerns quickly. Although as an OM this has been the most stressful 2 weeks of my career, Weave has made it more manageable."- Weave Customer
Prevent Burnout- Get A Mobile App for Your Optometry Practice
2. Start texting more
Spending all your time handling phone calls is a quick way to experience burnout. Transitioning to more business texting is popular across the healthcare industry right now because texts are 10 times less time consuming than phone calls. A mobile app should offer you and your team the ability to send and receive texts.
Texting with your patients doesn’t require you to write out every single message. Rely on templates to formulate your messaging and automate your messaging to save on time. If clients respond with questions to automated reminders and confirmations, you can begin a two-way text conversation through the right mobile app.
3. Schedule appointments
Optometry practice staff members, especially receptionists, work hard to make sure the office’s schedule stays filled. Dealing with reschedules and cancellations can take up swaths of time and cause burnout. A mobile app can alleviate the stress of scheduling patients by simplifying the process of sending reminders, confirmations, and finding last-minute replacements.
Before your clients come in for a visit, remind them of the appointment with a short, informative text. These texts can be scheduled to go out automatically at specific times and dates. Confirmation texts allow you to take advantage of sentiment analysis that interprets patient responses and reports rescheduling and cancellations.
4. Utilize lists
Rescheduling and cancellations can cause stress and burnout for office staff. If they’re working remotely without the appropriate tools, receptionists can feel helpless. Lists within an effective mobile app make it easy for your optometry practice to look up overdue patients, birthdays, and collections information.
An overdue patient list lets your team look up those clients most likely to accept an appointment on short notice. Birthday lists are great for maintaining a good rapport with your patients and sharing promotions to get more people into your office. A collections list simplifies the process of making certain your patients pay on time for their glasses and lenses.
→Watch How “Quick Fill” on the Mobile App Easily Fills Openings & Cancellations ↓↓
5. Keep track of patients
It’s critical for your team to have the ability to group patients with lists, but also have access to the personal histories of each client. Feeling out of the loop regarding patients’ information in conversation after conversation leads to burnout. Put your team in touch with customer insights even if they’re working remotely by using the right mobile app.
The right mobile app lets you use your smartphone to view upcoming appointments for each patient and their family members. It also makes it possible to see which insurance plan a client has and even the type of subscription they’re currently prescribed. Easily view outstanding balances and send text payment messages for quick collections.
6. Collaborate with your team
Although some employees prefer remote work, others feel isolated and burn out due to being socially isolated while working from home. A team chat that’s accessible through a mobile app gives your office a place to discuss, collaborate, quickly resolve problems, and get answers to patient questions. Since 86% of employees cite a lack of collaboration for workplace failures², it’s crucial that your practice adopt a user-friendly team chat.
A mobile app should let your front desk team notify optometrists of a patient’s arrival from anywhere. It also should facilitate group discussions, even if someone from the office is traveling or working from home. Perhaps the greatest perk of a team chat is getting questions answered quickly without having to wander the office or make a series of phone calls.
7. Strengthen online marketing
In recent decades, marketing strategies have moved increasingly toward building a robust online presence. If your office is focusing too intensely on traditional advertising, like billboards, radio and newspaper spots, and mailers, you may be frustrated by a lack of response. A mobile app gives you the ability to emphasize online strategies even while you’re working from your smartphone.
Besides developing your practice’s website and social media accounts, your optometry office should be consistently requesting reviews from patients. 95% of consumers now read online reviews before making a purchase³, so gathering a high number of positive reviews on popular sites like Google and Facebook is key to marketing success. A mobile app allows you to check your status on review sites and receive notifications of new reviews.
8. Check important metrics
Practice owners can experience burnout if they’re away from the office too long on business trips. Not knowing how the office is performing creates anxiety if you don’t have the right tools for checking up on your practice’s performance. A mobile app with analytical components eases the pain of being away from the office by putting you in touch with a number of metrics.
An analytic tool within a mobile app should let you check up on call times and call volume. In addition, it should give you access to invoices to ensure that payments are incoming at their usual rate. See how many patients are scheduled for upcoming appointments and get an idea of what your team can do to spur growth.
9. Send and receive documents
It can be exhausting shuttling from home to work just to send or receive a fax. Luckily, technology now allows us to fax documents from the palm of our hands. A mobile app isn’t complete without a faxing component.
Fax patients, coworkers, suppliers, and insurance companies through a feature in your mobile app. You can send a fax of documents already stored in your smartphone or take a new picture of a document you have on hand. Receive documents in electronic format from anywhere.
10. Control access and settings
If your optometry staff has access to every single feature within a mobile app, they might be a little lost or distracted. Make sure to adopt a mobile app that lets administrators control various levels of access to tools. This type of control ensures that employees stay focused on their given roles and responsibilities.
There’s a variety of settings that can be adjusted in a mobile app for optometry practices. From your smartphone, you should be able to adjust office hours, toggle notifications on and off, and make decisions about how to forward calls and schedule appointment reminders.
Weave’s Mobile App
Our mobile app is designed with optometrists in mind. Its user-friendly features are meant to keep you and your team from experiencing burnout. The mobile app makes life easier for optometrists and their staff by providing all of the tools listed above.
Weave’s mobile app lets you manage calls, texts, and scheduling from your smartphone. It puts you in touch with patient information, Quick Fill lists, and a team chat. It also gives your practice the ability to check its online reviews, view analytics, and deliver and receive faxes.
To discover more about how to prevent burnout at your optometry office with Weave’s mobile app, watch a free demo.
