|
| The Compliance Conundrum
|
| No patient is 100% compliant. Even your best patients sometimes miss their drops. But do you have any idea how often? Probably more often than you think. One of the problems is that both patients and their doctors tend to overestimate compliance. Fortunately, you hold the keys to compliance: patient education, communication and trust.
|
| |
|
| Role Playing: Do's and Don'ts for Kids with Special Needs
|
| What do you do when a young patient screams in the office? Ever had to chase a patient who’s running away and brandishing your retinoscope? These are but a few of the tricky situations we’d like to avoid when working with any of our patients, especially those with special needs. Patients with special needs can create problems with the staff, the schedule and other clients. Many optometrists avoid such populations because they can be frustrating and intimidating.
It’s normal to feel anxiety, but how can we manage this unique, special and needy population productively and to everyone’s satisfaction? Know that when we do provide care for these children, it really can be life changing for them, their parents—and even the doctor. As a parent of an 18-year-old daughter, Jessica, who has Down syndrome, I have the professional and personal experience of examining and living with children with special needs. In this fourth and final installment of Review’s “Role Playing” series, I’ll offer some tools to use—and actions to avoid—as we serve this special population.
|
| |
|
| Are You Violating Patient Confidentiality?
|
| What legal and ethical responsibilities does an optometrist usually have when transferring patient records? This question arises regularly, such as when an employee leaves a private practice, when a co-owner sells his or her interest in a private practice, when an optometrist’s lease agreement is terminated or when a practice is sold to another practitioner.
Answer the following four questions to test your knowledge of confidentiality requirements. Check the answers—which are based upon prevailing legal and ethical rules—and your colleagues’ responses from our e-mail survey. (Keep in mind that these obligations do vary somewhat from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.)
|
| |
|
| Premium IOLs: How to Manage Patient Expectations
|
| Although cataracts cause a multitude of difficulties for our patients, modern cataract surgery with quality postoperative comanagement can restore visual function.
Many patients have friends who underwent standard cataract correction, so they may have an idea of what to anticipate after the surgery. However, most patients do not have friends who have had surgery with a presbyopia-correcting IOL, so they probably do not know what to expect until they are properly educated by their O.D. This article provides an overview of how to honestly and realistically manage your cataract patients’ expectations.
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
