by Ophthalmology Business Staff Writer
How patients can
become effective
ambassadors for
your practice
V
isual outcomes beyond
20/20 in LASIK surgery
can affect the likelihood a
patient will refer a family
member or friend to your
practice, according to a study by
Steve Schallhorn, MD, global
medical director, Optical Express,
Glasgow, U.K., and colleagues that
looked at a large dataset from the
Optical Express Ambassador Referral
Program, which was launched in
2010.
Through the referral program,
patients have the opportunity to
refer a family member or friend, Dr.
Schallhorn said.
The program allowed Dr.
Schallhorn and colleagues to track
patients who referred another
patient.
"We looked at the characteristics
of those patients who referred another patient, but only analyzed those
referrals that resulted in a procedure
being performed in the referred
patient," he said.
In other words, a patient could
refer a friend but that friend might
have keratoconus and not be a good
candidate or elects not to undergo
surgery for whatever reason.
"Typically, this would be considered a referral, but it's not the way
we defined a referral in this analysis," Dr. Schallhorn said.
He and colleagues compared the
demographics, pre-treatment, and
post-treatment characteristics of
patients who were ambassadors—
they referred another patient and
that patient got treated—with those
of patients who did not make any
referrals.
Dr. Schallhorn found that there
was a higher likelihood of patients
referring another patient if they had
certain characteristics; one of those
characteristics is better uncorrected
vision. If they achieved 20/20 uncorrected visual acuity, they were more
likely to refer than those who did
not attain 20/20, he said.
"What's interesting is that they
were even more likely to refer if they
achieve 20/16 uncorrected vision,
meaning that achieving the best
uncorrected vision possible helps
drive referrals," Dr. Schallhorn said.
"In hindsight this seems obvious
and should not have been unexpected—that the better the uncorrected
vision, the more likely patients
would refer. But prior to this, we
could never apply evidence-based
methods to analyze the science of
patient referrals because it requires a
huge, accurate, and meticulous
dataset. Now with the Optical
Express data we can do the analysis,"
he said.
Dr. Schallhorn looked at one
year's worth of ambassadors, and the
data set was enormous. They had
about 18,000 patients who referred
another patient and compared those
18,000 to tens of thousands that did
not make any referral.
continued on page 22
September 2013 • Ophthalmology Business eZine
21
