The concept of lifestyle dispensing in eye care practices is not new. It is a tactic you can use to identify a patient's occupational and visual needs, and then offer the best options and materials to meet those needs. Most eye care professionals will agree these techniques can help boost sales and profits while delivering real lens benefits. Lifestyle dispensing helps to build patient loyalty too.

As an eye care professional, it is important to consider a variety of factors when recommending the right contact lens to your patients. Asking your patient questions such as whether or not he or she has an active lifestyle, works long hours, or even considering a patient’s age are all part of the contact lens selection process.

Your patients may want to become more involved in the process as well. So how do you take all of these factors into consideration and relay that information clearly to your patients? Here are some lifestyle questions that can help:

Does your patient have special needs?

First, make sure that you tell your eye care patients about their special needs. Does your patient have astigmatism? Is your patient a candidate for multifocal lenses? Since these special needs require special lenses such as toric lenses or multifocal lenses, having your patient understand what their needs are will help you guide them to the right contact lenses. CooperVision has a great YouTube channel resource that can help your patients learn more about astigmatism, presbyopia, and multifocal lenses if they want to learn more about their special needs.

What are your patient’s lifestyle habits?

Learning about how your patient spends a typical day, how long your patient expects to wear contact lenses through the course of the day, or even lifestyle activities can help you recommend a contact lens that is a good fit for your patient. For example, if you learn that a patient may occasionally sleep with his or her contact lenses in, then your recommendation may differ from a patient who will remove the lenses daily before bed. Once your patient has had his or her eye exam, having your patient take this Find A Lens quiz can also help with the contact lens selection process.

Daily disposable lenses have many advantages over other contact lens modalities. Whether its ocular health, convenience, or compliance, there are a variety of reasons that eye care professionals should consider making daily disposable contact lenses an integral part of their practice. Are you ready to embrace this growing modality in your practice?

CooperVision will hold a webinar on making daily disposables a significant part of your practice on March 27, 2013 at 9:00 PM (EST).

This webinar, hosted by Dr. Keith Wan, offers clear and practical advice on how to make daily disposables a big part of your contact lens practice.

Dr. Wan will talk about:

• Advantages of 1 Days for Patients
• Trends in Market Share & Growth and How to Leverage These in your Eye Care Practice
• Patient Compliance with 1 Days vs. Other Modalities
• Talking Points On Financial Concerns of Patients About 1 Days
• The Growing Popularity of the 1 Day Modality

Click here to register!

Dr. Keith Wan specializes in fitting contact lenses and medically indicated contact lenses for conditions such as keratoconus, high myopia, and anisometropia. Dr. Wan is board certified in the treatment of ocular disease, such as glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Therapeutic privileges are utilized with the ability to prescribe topical steroids, glaucoma, and systemic medications. He also participates in laser refractive surgery co-management and post refractive surgical care for patients. Dr. Wan was named America's Top Optometrist for 2006 and 2007 by the Consumers Research Council of America.

As an eye doctor, you care about your patient’s eye health. One important factor to consider when you have a patient in the chair is whether to sell a patient an annual supply of contact lenses. Selling your contact lens patients an annual supply is not only convenient, it can save them money, help keep them compliant, and is a great way for you to build your practice too.

Some of the benefits of selling an annual supply of contact lenses to your patients are:

Setting up patients to remember their annual eye exam

When you offer your patients the option to purchase an annual supply of contact lenses, you are giving your patient a chance to plan out their next eye exam. It is simple. Once the patient runs out of contact lenses, they can come back to your practice for an annual eye exam and get their next annual supply.

Saves your practice time:

By selling your patients an annual supply of contact lenses, you save your staff the hassle of having to take the time to dispense a partial order midyear. It also saves shipping costs too.

Increases revenue and cash flow:

When you sell an annual supply, you increase cash flow at once because you are collecting revenue in one complete transaction instead of delaying part of the sale.

Helps keep patients compliant:

When patients have an annual supply, they are more likely to be compliant with sticking to their replacement schedules.

These are just a few reasons why selling an annual supply of contact lenses is good for both your patient and your practice. If you are looking for more resources to help you and your practice, make sure to visit our Build Your Practice section on our site.

As an eye care professional, you know that not all patients are the same with the same needs. Some patients may need a little extra time when it comes to fitting them with the right contact lenses. These include patients who have astigmatism that may need to be fit with toric contact lenses. As a world leader of toric contact lenses, CooperVision has the products and the expertise to help you successfully fit toric lenses.

Here are some helpful tips that you can use when you want to fit toric contact lenses:

Ask yourself the right questions:

• Is this patient a candidate for toric soft contact lenses?
• What material best meets the patient's vision and lifestyle needs?
• Which lens is available for the parameters that are necessary to fit the patient?

Make sure that you know what tools are available to you.

CooperVision offers a variety of support when it comes to fitting toric contact lenses. In fact, we have an entire section devoted to you on our practitioner website that gives you easy access to a variety of helpful toric fitting information, including procedures for diagnostic and empirical fitting, helpful case studies, and much more.

Use the fitting guides offered by contact lens manufacturers.

It is essential to fit your patient correctly with a toric contact lens if you want a successful practice. So why not use the tools offered to you by contact lens manufacturers that can help you do that? CooperVision offers a great tool called the ToriTrak Calculator that is the most accurate method of fitting our toric contact lenses and is designed to eliminate errors in estimating lens rotation.

No matter what your fitting needs may be, CooperVision is able to provide you with the tools to fit your toric patients.

The holiday season is in full swing, and as an eye doctor with a practice to maintain, you may be wondering how to use social media without getting lost in the holiday shuffle. Here are some tips on how to use social media during the holidays that any eye care practice can easily pull off:

• Write social media content in advance: This is a piece of advice that will get any eyecare practice through the holidays. Since employees are going to want to take time off, may get busy with other tasks in the office during the season, or just may have writer’s block, stocking up on future posts is always a good way to just ensure that your social media pages are still active and engaged with patients. As you write these posts, make sure they are relevant for the holiday season and optimized (for example use helpful hashtags in Twitter)
• Make sure your content is engaging: Writing content that is worth reading and sharing with patients is essential. During the holiday season, patients will want to know important things such as spending their FSA dollars before the year’s end, how to look good for holiday parties, driving at night, and other relevant eye related information. The more engaging your content is, the more likely a patient will share that content with their own friends and family.
• Showcase your practice’s charitable side: The holidays are all about giving, so why not show how your eyecare practice gives back? It allows patients to see how your practice is invested in the local or even global community. From doing a food drive, to volunteering in a soup kitchen with your staff, there are so many ways for your eye care practice to get involved.
• Offer exclusive deals: Reward your fans and followers with an exclusive offer that only they can redeem. This tip works year round, but holiday deals are a great way to get patients excited about coming to your eye care practice.

These tips should help your practice on how to use social media for holidays. For more great tips on how to create a web presence with your practice, make sure to read CooperVision’s CV+ blog.

Are you an eye doctor interested in upgrading your patients in a 2-week contact lens? Introduce them to Avaira.

As the only two-week lens to have polyethylene glycol (PEG), as an integral component of the contact lens, Avaira lenses provide comfort for patients. Not only at the end of each day, but during the entire wearing cycle. This is due in part to PEG’s ability to tightly bind water, helping maintain hydration, and helping eliminate the need for rewetting agents. Many patients are also intrinsically familiar with PEG's benefits because it is a key ingredient in leading dry eye relief drops.

The Avaira family of soft contact lenses is the only naturally wettable two-week silicone hydrogel contact lens. Made from a unique material that attracts and binds water to the lens, Avaira lenses stay moist and comfortable without surface treatments or wetting agents that can wash off as you clean your contacts as the result of our unique Aquaform® Technology. It creates a softer, more flexible lens material, which help contribute to Avaira's long-lasting comfort.

If you are attending the American Academy of Optometry Meeting in Phoenix this week, make sure to stop by the CooperVision booth to learn more about how Avaira can help grow your practice. For more information on the Avaira family of contact lenses, click here.

Don’t miss out the third webinar that is part of the Building Your Practice series today. In this webinar, Dr. Steven Berger will discuss how the use of the 2-week modality can help you keep your contact lens patients comfortable, happy, and prevent them from dropping out!

We'll cover the major reasons — both economic and clinical — that cause patients to discontinue their lens wear, and effective methods to combat these issues.

Dr. Steven Berger, Owner/Operator of Eye to Eye Contact, is celebrating his 25th Anniversary in Delaware County. With more than 25 years of experience, Dr. Berger has also served as a professional advisor and speaker for both contact lens and spectacle manufacturers, allowing him to always keep a step ahead with the newest technology in optical products.

Make sure to click here to reserve your spot for this exciting webinar.

Are you interested in building your practice? Make sure to register for the third webinar in a three part series called Your Practice in Focus. This webinar series is in partnership with ODWire.org and will focus on important topics and trends that will help you build your practice.

The third webinar in the series is on Patient Retention: Leveraging the 2 Week Modality) on October 17 at 9:00 pm (EST). Click here to register.

Retaining contact lens patients is critical to the economic health of any practice -- each patient that drops out can cost a practice $20,000 or more over the practice's lifetime. In this webinar, Dr. Steven Berger from Eye To Eye Contact will discuss how the use of the 2-week modality can help you keep your contact lens patients comfortable, happy, and prevent them from dropping out!

Dr. Berger will cover the major reasons -- both economic and clinical -- that cause patients to drop out of contact lens wear, and what ODs like you can do to prevent contact lens dropout.

There will be an open Q&A at the end of the talk, so make sure to bring your questions!

Dr. Steven Berger is an independent OD with his practice Eye to Eye Contact. With more than 25 years of experience, Dr. Berger has also served as a professional advisor and speaker for both contact lens and spectacle manufacturers, allowing him to always stay in the loop with the newest technology in optical products.

Eye doctors are well aware of the growing number of presbyopes in the U.S. Fitting presbyopes provides a huge opportunity for contact lens practice growth. The number of presbyopic patients is expected to double by 2030 and will account for 20% of the population. It is estimated that over 30% of patients in the average practice are presbyopes. In addition, approximately 2 million current contact lens wearers are becoming presbyopic each year… and the majority of them want to continue to wear contacts. Soft multifocal contacts provide distinct benefits for both patients and practitioners.

Benefits for Patients

We all know that for presbyopic patients, soft multifocal contacts allow them to participate in numerous activities without the hassle of glasses and provide better peripheral vision. Many people also use computers. Multifocal contacts eliminate the need to tilt the head back like patients have to with glasses. Glasses can also become uncomfortable on the bridge of the nose and on and behind the ears as well. Multifocal contacts are also a great option for patients that want to look their best. There are also benefits for children with accommodative or convergence excess problems. Most children don’t want to wear bifocal glasses and multifocal contacts allow them to have the additional plus that is needed at near. With multifocal contact lenses, younger patients may benefit from more self confidence.

Why Multifocals?

Many doctors still utilize monovision to fit their presbyopic patients, but humans have a binocular visual system. There is an old adage that states, ‘two eyes are better than one’. Multifocal contacts provide improved intermediate vision that may be lacking with monovision and maintains binocular summation which enhances stereopsis and, usually, both distance and near acuity. Numerous studies have concluded that when given the opportunity to experience both multifocals and monovision, the majority of patients prefer multifocals 1,2,3 In a supplement to the July 2012 issue of Contact Lens Spectrum entitled, ‘Multifocals: The New Standard of Care’, Dr. John Schachet states, ‘We've established that multifocal contact lenses have replaced monovision as the standard of care’. I concur with that statement.

Benefits for Eye Doctors

There are also benefits to fitting multifocal contacts for doctors. The main benefit, besides the gratification of satisfying the needs of the patient, is the increase in patient referrals. Invariably, when I have successfully fit a patient with multifocals, that patient is enthusiastic and excited and always seems to have a friend, family member or co-worker that is referred for a multifocal fitting. That leads to an increase in practice revenue and profitability.

Fitting multifocal contacts benefits both patient and doctor and is the win-win solution that eye doctors are always seeking.

There are several ways to boost the number of patients with presbyopia who wear soft multifocal lenses in your practice. The first and most important way is for the doctor to recommend, or at least offer soft multifocals as an option to all patients with presbyopia who may be suitable candidates. Here are some more tips to help you grow your multifocal practice

• Realize That Patients Rely On Your Opinion: Patients need to know all of their vision correction options when it comes to presbyopia. In a recent European survey, patients were asked why they chose the contact lenses that they were wearing. The number one reason by far why they wore the lenses that they wore (61% - the next closest response was 20%) was because of ‘the recommendation of the doctor.’ In a study in Denmark last year entitled “Sight over Forty,” most patients with presbyopia said that they were unaware that soft multifocal contacts even existed as an option and that 50% of them were interested in trying them if their doctors had suggested them.
• Train Your Staff: Another important factor is to train your staff to be knowledgeable about presbyopia and soft multifocal lenses. There are opportunities for trained staff to discuss presbyopia and the options to correct it when patients call the office, at the reception desk upon entering the office, during pre-testing, and in the dispensary. Staff should have enough of an understanding to be able to guide patients to ask the doctor if they may be a suitable candidate for soft multifocal lenses. It is helpful if any of your staff members with presbyopia wears soft multifocal lenses in the office. They can discuss their own experience with soft multifocal contact lenses with patients.
• Learn About New Product Offerings: There is a new multifocal contact lens option that should help you build out your multifocal practice even further. Proclear 1 day multifocal contact lenses can appeal to a broad group of patients with presbyopia. One day disposables are certainly the most convenient and healthiest contact lens option.
• Identify Ideal Multifocal Candidates: Whether its emerging presbyopes who prefer the one day modality, patients who would like to wear contact lenses occasionally or even patients interested in switching over to multifocal contact lenses from monovision, there are a variety of patients that you can fit with multifocal contact lenses. All of your single vision one day patients who now have presbyopia and current patients with presbyopia who are wearing one day lenses as monovision are ideal candidates. Many current soft multifocal wearers in a two week or monthly modality may be interested in wearing a daily disposable now that a viable option is available.

The key is to be proactive. Informing and educating your patients with presbyopia about soft multifocal lenses and making a recommendation that will benefit them will result in a definite increase in the number of patients wearing these lenses.