The Academy of Advanced Ophthalmic Optics provides mentoring opportunities to develop practitioner skills in the context of their own practice environment. These can be either single practice mentorship or group mentorship of up to 5 mentees.

Our mentoring program delivers weekly online meetings between our professional team and your practice to discuss complex cases, practical techniques and develop models to spot potential issues.

In addition to the weekly meetings, our service offers email support with a rapid  response to address your practical questions in an ongoing context. These questions can be of a specific case based nature or more general and systemic. All contact with our team helps us build and develop your practice to meet its full potential.

Pre-requisite: successful completion of the Advanced Ophthalmic Optics 1 Mentorship Program

Content

Areas covered in the program include:

    • Ophthalmic skills assessment and implementation
    • Lens selection and product structure
    • Remake tracking and warranty analysis
    • Patient assessment development

Many of these areas will involve development of specific tools by the practitioner with our assistance to implement in practice. This is conducted as part of our weekly meetings with the practitioner.

Structure

The program consists of an initial meeting to determine the practitioners current practice environment. This may be conducted remotely but is most effectively performed on site in the practice. This meeting also allows the initial parameters for benchmarking progress in the practice to be established.

After the initial setup the program can function remotely and takes the form of remote (online/phone) meetings once a week. These meetings are used to develop unique models and tools for tracking practice performance and to provide support during the implementation of these tools. 

The duration of the program is variable however we recommend that a period six months is undertaken as a minimum. This period allows two full lens warranty cycles to complete, thereby giving an accurate indication of practice performance. With this in mind a typical structure for a six month program would be:

Week
1 Initial assessment and setup
2 Model development
3 Data extraction techniques
4-5 Model implementation
6 - 9 Monitoring and development
10 Interim assessment
11 Model revision
12-15 Monitoring and development
16 Interim Assessment
17 Model revision
18-24 Monitoring and development
25 Data extraction and reporting
26 Final assessment of performance indicators

Return on Investment

Dissatisfied patients and remakes can have significant repercussions on a practice, for example, cases which addresses cost of goods and opportunity costs through potential lost consults and sales.

A typical case could potentially have an overall loss of over $5000 (please email us if you wish to see the exact calculations) due to:

    1. Potential sales loss while seeing the patient i.e. opportunity costs
    2. Lost future sales with that patient 

What causes these cases?  Around 80% of causes are within the practitioners control and can be reduced through:

    1. Continuing education 
    2. Development of product 
    3. Technical knowledge 

Looking at a practitioner with <1% of patients experiencing difficulty over a year these loss numbers can easily exceed the net profit per practitioner.

When put in the context of the revenue impact of negative patient interactions our CPD and practice development represents a greater return on investment than advertising and develops your team to provide ongoing excellence in service.