Ординатура / Офтальмология / Английские материалы / Diagnosing and Treating Computer-Related Visual Problems_Sheedy, Shaw-McMinn_2003

234 Diagnosing and Treating Computer-Related Vision Problems

certain business hours to facilitate the appointment scheduling of your computer workers. Suppose the computer workers of a large company near you has a lunch hour from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM. You may want to reserve this hour for examining their patients and take your lunch hour from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM. If the company’s typical work hours are 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, you may wish to open at 7:00 AM or remain open until 7:00 PM.

You may wish to choose a theme to use that indicates your interest in computer vision. Woodcrest Vision Clinic: computer vision services and products, your computer vision specialist, vision comfort for computer users, high tech for high-tech computer users.

A patient will experience your practice brand in many different ways before, during, and after the actual encounter. All these influence points offer an opportunity to monitor and enhance the patient’s perception about the brand image. Before any visit, word of mouth and referral sources that have been properly capitalized on can offer positive reinforcement. During the visit, the emphasis on catering to the computer user through staff communications, physical condition of the practice surroundings, examination procedures, and patient education material all have a direct bearing on the patient’s perception of your practice brand. Finally, after the visit, you can solidify your brand image through follow-up communications, including phone calls, newsletters, surveys, e-mails, and recall notices.

At Woodcrest Vision Clinic, we emphasize computer vision brand by including computer vision services and products on all our marketing materials, offering computer vision information over our Web site, sending information to computer-using patients via e-mail, offering use of a computer with a digital subscriber line in our reception area, having staff scripts to use with computer-using patients on issues relevant to them, and offering computer magazines in the reception room, along with a computer game glassedin reception area for children.

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Step 5: Managing the Marketing Mix

At this point in the process, you must decide on four factors, referred to as the four Ps, of the marketing mix (Borden, 1965) by Professor Jerome McCarthy:

1.Price. Fees charged to patients and terms of sales

2.Product. Services and products the practice offers

3.Place. Physical distribution that makes products and services available to patients

4.Promotion. All communication activities the practice performs

Price

Fees you charge computer users should be on a level similar to other fees you charge until you become known as offering an expertise that is in great demand. After establishing yourself as a computer vision specialist with much to offer, you can increase your fees. The main determinate is whether your services and products are in great demand. Proper marketing provides this demand for computer vision services and products.

Product

What services and products do you wish to offer? Review the chapters in the book and decide what you are prepared to market. Will you offer a separate computer vision evaluation in addition to the basic eye examination? Will you offer a computer simulator examination? Variable focus lens designs? Monitor filters? Visual therapy? Daily wear contact lenses? Each of these requires office policies and staff training to be made properly available to your patients. PRIO now offers frames and lenses designed for computer users. Are you going to supply these? What about punctal plugs? Therapeutic pharmaceutical agents for conditions leading to dry eye? You must decide. Choose from Box 14-3 which services and products related to computer vision you wish to offer and set up policies and staff training to deal with them.

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Place

The obvious answer to where to offer products and services is your office, but you may wish to offer computer vision evaluations at the patient’s home or work. If you become a consultant conducting workplace evaluations for companies, your place just changed from that of your office. What do you decide?

Promotion

Much of Chapter 2 dealt with promotion. Research by the co-author has shown that once a practice is successful and booked in advance, no outside promotion is necessary. Word of mouth is sufficient to maintain and grow a practice. However, when offering new services such as computer vision, marketing to bring in new patients is necessary. Look at the marketing methods in Box 14-4 and choose which ones you are most comfortable with. Criteria for choosing them may include ease of implementation, cost, and expected return.

Step 6: Understand Product and Service Characteristics That Computer Users Value

This was addressed, in part, in Chapter 2. Here we will build on what is important to our computer-using patients. It is helpful to recall that patients do not buy our services but rather solutions to their problems. In your marketing, communicate that you have solutions available that will make their lives easier—at work, at play, and whenever they are using a computer.

How you and your staff feel will eventually be how your patients feel. Be sure to train staff properly and get their buy-in concerning the offering of computer vision services in your practice. Chapter 1 may be helpful in educating them to the importance of computer vision. Prescribing computer glasses or visual therapy for staff members may assist them in recognizing the worth of what you have to offer to computer users. Complete computer vision evaluations on your staff and prescribe appropriately. Experiencing the benefits of treatment such as computerspecific glasses allows them to give personal testimonials to patients.

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Box 14-4

Marketing to bring in new patients

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Always provide quality service. Research shows that above all, patients want confidence that they are getting what they need. Even if you make a mistake, correcting it quickly will be acceptable. Computer users want quality in a reasonable amount of time. Most work 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the very least. Their work often is stressful. They appreciate convenient hours and pleasant staff attending to their needs. “Service quality is the foundation for services marketing because the core product being marketed is performance. The performance is the product; the performance is what customers buy” (Berry, 1991).

The following practical tactics will assist you in providing the highest possible service quality:

1.Perform in-office patient surveys and focus groups to learn their perceptions.

2.Provide customer service training to members of the staff.

3.Anticipate patient expectations and then surpass them (e.g., a computer workstation with Internet access in the reception area).

4.Review and change any office systems that inconvenience patients. You may wish to be open during normal lunch hours.

5.Offer staff incentives to enhance service. Provide bonuses or “spiffs” to staff for each satisfied computer-user patient.

6.Focus on the functional quality of service that patients readily understand. They understand computers. Do a good job with your computers in the practice.

Review Chapter 2 and incorporate as many of those ideas as possible to make your practice computer-user friendly.

Step 7: Formulate a Marketing Plan

Based on the above process, your marketing plan will be the answer to the following questions:

Marketing Plan for Woodcrest Vision Center

1. The purpose of my marketing is to increase the number of computeruser patients by 104 this year.

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242 Diagnosing and Treating Computer-Related Vision Problems

Marketing Yourself as a Computer Vision Specialist 243

Summary

More and more of our patients are using computers daily. Soon the average patient we see will be a computer user. Providing computer vision services and products will allow the eye care practitioner to carry out his or her mission as a provider of eye care. Solving the problems of our computer-using patients will improve their lives and result in enthusiastic patients. Use the marketing information in Chapters 2 and 14 to communicate the benefits of what you have to offer to the general public. Learn from Chapters 3 through 12 and enjoy the satisfaction of one who has contributed to the betterment of others.

Action Items

1.Work through each part of the process in completing a marketing plan listed in Box 14-1.

2.Use the information gathered from Box 14-1 to complete your marketing plan as in Box 14-2.

3.Review the examples of marketing materials in Appendices 14-3 and 14-4 and adapt them to your situation.

4.Place your marketing plan on a marketing calendar.

References

Berry L, Parasuraman A. Marketing Services. New York: Free Press, 1991;5.

Borden N. The Concept of the Marketing Mix. In G Schwartz (ed), Science in Marketing. New York: John Wiley, 1965;386–397.

Levinson JC. Guerrilla Marketing Attack. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Moss G, Shaw-McMinn PG. Eyecare Business: Marketing and Strategy. Boston: Butterworth–Heinemann, 2001.