The Science of Persuasion in Your Optical: Using Psychology to Drive Sales

Mark Hinton: We need to weigh and measure the words that we use with people. We need to give grace to grace. We need to make sure that we get rid of ugly words. We need to lead patients where we want them to go and not ask permission to lead them there. 

Bethany Fishbein: Welcome back! I am Bethany Fishbein, CEO of the Power Practice and host of The Power Hour Optometry Podcast. And this is kind of an unintentional part two to last week’s podcast. Last week we talked to Eugene Shatsman from National Strategic Group, who has a background in psychology that he brought into marketing and had a good conversation about the words that you’re using in your marketing and how they make a difference in the results and the outcome of those efforts. 

And that conversation led me to think about the experiences that I’ve had with Mark Hinton. And Mark has a similar background. He has a master’s in behavioral psychology, then became an optician. He’s an optician in a working practice with an optometrist partner in North Carolina. 

He is also the founder of eYeFacilitate, which is a consulting group, helps practices increase their optical sales, among other things. And he agreed to join me today to talk about how the words you’re using in your practice affect the outcome of the patient’s visits. So, Mark, thank you so much for being here!

Mark Hinton: Well, Dr. Bethany, I am very excited to be with you today and have an extraordinary audience to glean some great little pearls to take away and be able to think about within their own practices. 

Bethany Fishbein: We’ve been talking just lately about the power of a single conversation and how sometimes you get that one little thing or that one little pearl that you didn’t go there to get. You were just talking to someone, and it ends up being something that changes how you do something else and can have huge rippling impacts for your business, your personal life. Like conversations count. 

Mark Hinton: 100%. Every word we choose counts. And fascinating to me, most people who develop their narratives and their dialogues and their monologues with patients really didn’t think a whole lot about what they wanted that to evolve to. They picked it up along the way. Doctors picked it up in their training. Remember the first time you ever did an exam on a patient? It took an hour.

Bethany Fishbein: It took three. 

Mark Hinton: Yeah, there you go. And you’re learning. You’re picking up, you’re memorizing. You’re looking at stylings. Opticians usually pick up how they communicate with the patients from somebody else and always say, when is the last time you really challenged your own dialogues and your own words? 

Because when we think about it, the best communication does not take place at the speaker’s ears. It takes place at the speaker’s mouth. It takes place at the listener’s ears. So I’m really critical of the words that I choose to use with a patient in order to help them influence themselves to accept the doctor’s advice.

Bethany Fishbein: Before we get into the words, I’m curious about your background because we were talking before we started recording about your education in psychology. How did you make the jump to take that and then become an optician? 

Mark Hinton: When I was a child, I got my first glasses when I was five years old, and I thought they were pretty terrible. And I didn’t really want to be Clark Kent. I wanted to be something else altogether, maybe a superhero. So I used to sit and draw what glasses of the future would look like or what a superhero would wear. I got kind of hooked on that when I was young, just prior to being a teenager, I had pets that outside in cages.

I had an iguana that could spot a budding flower probably 100 yards away. And then I had a warm, furry little guinea pig that couldn’t see an inch in front of its face. So I got really fascinated with vision and sight. And then as time went on, I got really interested in the brain, the human brain, and how people think. 

So I did my undergrad psychology, did my master’s in behavioral psychology with a concentration on statistical psychology. And that was a blending more of sociology, where we keep a lot of track of numbers and stats and things. And I got really interested in that. But when it came down to it, when it came to, alright, so what am I going to do with this? Am I going to get a PhD? I didn’t love the research enough at the time.

And coincidentally, about the same time, Hillsborough College was opening their first school of opticianry, and my father in law said, you break your glasses every week, you should probably do this. One thing led to another, I enrolled and I was accepted. And years later, years and years later, the psychology part came in to play when I realized that patients now had choice, when big box stores first opened, and it was fascinating because I’d never had a patient look across the table and say, well, let me think about this, or I’m going to go check out that store that opened that has two pairs for $99.

And all of a sudden I’m 911. What’s going on? And it made me really stop and think about, what are they really hearing? What am I missing? Why do they want to leave and go elsewhere and be inconvenienced? I’ve always made their glasses for them, and that’s the blending of how the two came together. 

Bethany Fishbein: What year did you finish school and start practicing?

Mark Hinton: That was before they came up with fire. No, that was back in the 70s. That was late 70s.

Bethany Fishbein: So the patients that you were seeing then and I’ve only heard these things, but the patients that you were seeing then were assuming they were going to buy glasses in the place where they got their exam they were paying cash. I’ve heard the stories from older doctors. Is that really what it was? 

Mark Hinton: Oh, it was a joy! Back then, we didn’t have managed vision care plans. We didn’t have smartphones. So we could look everything up and we just truly bought and finished whatever we were doing with that particular individual. And ophthalmology wasn’t dispensing. 

So Wednesday afternoons and Friday afternoons, myself and one of my team members would go to the different ophthalmology offices and teach the text how to troubleshoot lenses, how to use a Lensometer, how to read prism, how to use a base curve lens clock. And as a result, they were so happy; they sent us all their refractions. We were filling approximately 175 prescriptions a day. It was crazy!

Bethany Fishbein: It was 75 pairs of glasses a day?

Mark Hinton: Yeah, I had 14 opticians working in my offices at one time, and it was glorious. And then things changed when managed care came along. Things changed when we saw the advent of two pairs for $89. That was the first commoditization of eyewear, and it was the first opportunity for consumers to think, I’ll get my exam here, but I’m going there to get my glasses. 

Bethany Fishbein: And was that like the lens crafters? Like just commercial optical started advertising? Do you remember what brought that into the market? 

Mark Hinton: Yeah, it wasn’t really lens crafters yet. At that time, I was in Florida, and it was Eckerd optical. So the Eckerd pharmacies opened up to opticals in all of their stores. Then we had the opening of these dental offices that started putting eyewear in, and it just grew from there to the point where then we had Lens Crafters, and then we had the early Lens Crafters, but we had more vision works early on, and then ultimately across the street opened up the Walmart super center. So it was an evolution, but once it took boy, it took pretty quickly.

Bethany Fishbein: It’s so interesting to think about looking at that with a researcher’s mind. Right? It’s so easy to have an emotional reaction. And we talk all the time with doctors who are, oh, no, this is happening to me. Oh, I can’t make money because or, I can’t succeed because and they just feel so passive, like the world is conspiring against their practice. 

And so to have that research background, especially in something like statistical psychology, to say, let me step away and kind of analyze this objectively to figure out what’s going on here, why is this message resonating with patients? Why is it working? And why is what I’m doing no longer working? That’s hugely valuable!

Mark Hinton: It is. And for the consumer, they were driven by the idea that you can bring your prescription here and get your glasses for less. So now what happened was it became about money, and it’s still very much about money. And I’m sure that you’re going to get into this, but one of the areas that we really need to think about is changing our words in our offices where we look at our managed vision care plans as insurance, like VSP and IMED. Those types of vision plans, those are memberships. 

We don’t call them insurance in our office because they’re not insurance. They don’t sure the patient. They pretty much bought a vision plan to get a savings on the general eye health exam and the glasses or the contact lenses. So we use words like insurance. And frankly, insurance is something everybody buys but they don’t want. They don’t even use it. I mean, if it truly was insurance, we’d look at it differently. 

There’d be deductibles, there’d be some catastrophic deductibles, but there aren’t. There’s just copays. The average cost for a VSP or IMED is about $8 a month. So for under $100, I get your $175 exam for $20. And sometimes I’m not even there for the glasses. I just want the exam for less. And then I’m going to go over to Costco or somewhere else to buy my glasses for less insurance coverage, add on out of pocket overage allowance. 

Terrible words to use because they’re all money focused. And so then we teach our patients to look at us and go, well, I only want what’s covered or what’s my frame allowance? And it’s interesting because they may be in the office buying a Tom Ford frame, and they want to know what their frame allowance is, but they never ask about other Tom Ford products, other Tom Ford fashion products. They want it or they don’t. 

So we’ve commoditized it. We’ve cheapened it with the words that we use. Every word counts. So we got to get rid of the ugly words. And when you said maybe you’ll share the name game and the word game, I’d be happy to share it. You can post it for your readers to use it. But we’ve got to get rid of those words because they don’t entice the patient to want to buy something. I want to give you an example. What’s my frame allowance? 

Well, you get up to $150, but if you go over that, you get an additional 20% off. That just leads the consumer to say, well, where are your $150 frames? I’m not going to answer the question. I want to lead to emotion and logic. I want to lead them with how they want to look, not what it’s going to cost. So the patient says, how much do I get towards a frame? You know what, Carol, you have extraordinary savings with your VSP membership. 

As soon as we find your favorite frames, the ones that you put on, you look in the mirror and you say, yes, this is how I want to look, then I’m going to subtract the benefit that you have for that, and I’m going to show you what your savings is. What are you hoping to look like with your new frames? What do you want to change up this time, Bethany, six out of ten times. Now they’re interested in how they’re going to look instead of what they’re going to cost. That’s one example of how we change up our words. 

Bethany Fishbein: So when you started to realize this and you started to change the words that you were using, is it feeling? Are you testing? Like, how do you get to the knowledge of this work? 

Mark Hinton: Such a good question. I went back to the basics of psychology, human behavior. We buy with emotion, and we just buy with logic. How many times have you or any of the listeners, this podcast, walked past a window with no idea what was in that window? And you looked and you saw it, and all of a sudden, your emotion said, I got to have it. 

And then logic kicked in, and you figured out how to get it. That was how I started to look at that. I remember 30 years ago sitting across from a patient who came out of the exam room, and he’d been a patient of ours for years. And I said, Mitch, I’m going to explain how your new lenses are advanced over the lenses that you’ve been wearing. And he looked right at me, Bethany, and he said, please don’t, Mark. Just give me what Dr. Mittoos said I need. 

That was my moment. That was my moment to realize that I was just overloading with information and I wasn’t asking right questions. I was just filling in the spaces and the gaps, thinking that they wanted a lot of education in optical. They don’t. Optical is not the place to do the educating the exam room is. And I backed off of that, and I thought, wow, I answer questions all day long that the patient didn’t ask, how silly is that? And so I started to work with my doctors at the time in the idea that they’re not buying me, they’re buying you. 

And in fact, they don’t even know I own the business. They don’t even know whether I’ll be here next time, but the doctor will be. So we started working together on the idea that our questions need to be better. During pretest, our questions are often not open ended. They’re closed ended loops. Like, ask any man that walks into the exam room, sits down when you walk in, how have your eyes been doing? And he’ll say, fine. What brings you in today? 

You guys sent me a notice and said I needed to be here, or my wife told me I needed to be here. So they’re not good questions. But if we flip them to open ended questions, what are you hoping that Dr. Fishbein is going to do to help you see better than you’re seeing? Now, what are your concerns? Long distance? Close up? Your desktop? Nighttime? We’re going to get better answers. And when we get better answers at pretest, they provide targets for the doctor to now be able to prescribe a solution for the patient. 

So in my mind, what I realized was he said, just give me what Dr. Mitta said I needed. And my instant thought was, well, he wants what Dr. Mitta told him to get. He doesn’t care about the explanation from me about how much different it is. It was based in time. It was based in I buy my doctor. And we’ve really had optician optometry wrong for a long, long time. Questions.

Do your eyes ever feel dry, scratchy, irritated, wet? No. Better question when during the day do you notice that your eyes feel scratchy, dry, irritated, watery? It’s a better question because the patient feels like they’re included, and other patients have that rather than being singled out. And by human nature, if they feel like we’re fishing for it, they’re going to back off. If I say yes, then they’re going to try and sell me something.

So it led us to realize we don’t ask the patients if they would be interested in something. We ask the patient, would you want to know? And that’s very different. So when it comes to words, it’s really master crafting, those words. So for me, it was really recognizing, listening clearly to what that patient said, just give me what the doctor said I need. 

Bethany Fishbein: So let’s take some of those words. And you’ve given a lot of examples, like, already just talking through the different parts of the visit as they’ve come up for you. But just to give a little bit of order here, the interaction with a patient starts before the patient ever comes into the office. Right? So a week ago, about the words on your website and whether book now or schedule an appointment, they’re saying the same thing, but they have different impact. 

And, Mark, you see a lot of offices like we do. What are some of the things that you observe before the patient even gets in on that initial phone call that offices are doing typically that you know from your experience that there’s totally a better way? 

Mark Hinton: Yeah. ‘Did you want to’ that’s the number one. Did you want to let me go over your insurance and what your benefits are? We recommend that you have the retinal screening when you come to the office. So all of these things that we’re just throwing out there for people to say no or for us to limit ourselves with, let me go over your insurance, that’s limiting. If they don’t ask, we’re not going over it. 

And even if they do ask, it’s like, Carol, I would love to be able to answer that for you. We won’t know how to answer that until we know what Dr. Fishbein is prescribing for you during your exam. Then we’re going to maximize your vision, membership benefits to your best advantage so that you’ll feel happy. That’s an example.

Bethany Fishbein: What about when the patient is asking for something that you don’t have, like they say, Are you open Saturdays and you’re not? 

Mark Hinton: Yeah, absolutely. So other than Saturday, when is the best time for us to be able to provide you care? So I’m redirecting it and we redirect a lot in psychology. Another example, we redirect immediately to the we always defer back to the exam room in optical. When you were in the exam room today, you’ll recall that the doctor prescribed so it’s redirecting. And usually what it is they’re saying, are you open Saturdays? 

And I could say, no, we’re not. And they’ll hang up. But I’m going to keep that open. So are you open Saturdays? Other than Saturdays, what’s another day that you would have available for us to reserve an appointment for you? And more often we get another day. Well, are you open any evenings? We are on Thursdays. Will that be helpful for you? 

So that’s an example of how we would redirect and still keep the patient I want to share this. When we answer the phone, we say thank you for choosing Envision Eye Care. This is Mark. May I ask your name? That’s, to the point of picking the right words, also said, thank you for calling. Thank you for choosing this is Mark. May I ask your name? Because we want to personalize it.

Bethany Fishbein: So you say this is Mark. May I ask your name? And I say, Hi, I’m Bethany. 

Mark Hinton: Bethany, I’m so happy that you called. How can I help you? 

Bethany Fishbein: Got it. And then it’s whatever it is that leads into you had mentioned before the idea of the name game. And this is something that after we had heard of from you, we started doing in our office. And it’s one of those things, right? It’s so obvious that it’s hard to believe this is what you teach people and it makes a difference. But on the receiving end, it makes a difference. Share what it is and how it works. And I’ll share some of the things that impacted in our practice. Super interesting!

Mark Hinton: It’s one of those things we hear one of our past presidents said nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And in today’s world of medicine, we are pin numbers and dates of birth and we’re Mr. That and Mrs. This. But respectfully, what I should find out is how you want us to know you in the office. And it’s important to us throughout every touch point with a new team member that they’re saying, carol, we’re so happy that you’re in the office today and how’s your experience so far? 

And it’s building that we also know, Bethany, that we’re going to ask them for money at the end. So people really there are a couple of things here. When I use the patient’s name, I pull them back to me immediately if they’re drifting. To give you an example, in optical, the patient makes a statement or asks a question that’s a perfect time to connect with their personal name? Well, that’s a really good question, Bethany. I’m glad you asked. 

We’ve had other patients that have felt the same way. And so it’s a one to one relationship, not a retailer trying to make a sale. I am going to say this. We don’t care about the money. We don’t we’re not an off for profit, but we don’t care about the money. We care about the process. And the process is the absolute extraordinary customer service every step of the way. Master crafting every word. 

To give you another example of Master Crafting, the words I could say, well, what we need you to do is this. I’m going to ask you some questions now, but I need to preface that with making it about the patient. So before we ask any questions in pretest, we look at the patient and say, Cheryl, I want you to have an extraordinary experience today, and I’m going to ask you some questions to help the doctor during the exam so that we don’t miss anything that’s important for you connecting with the patient. 

Nothing’s quite as sweet as the patient hearing their own name. Patient’s name could be Patricia, and that’s what it is on her insurance card. But if we call her Patricia when we go to call her in for the exam, she may not answer because she goes by Patty and she has and everybody knows who is Patty. So we really make it a point to connect. We really make it a point to use their preferred name, an outstanding experience, and to be sure that we’re choosing the words that let them know it’s all about them. 

Hey, Patty, if we found out during your exam today that you were really an excellent candidate to occasionally wear contact lenses and switch off from your glasses, would you want to know? Not would you be interested? 

Bethany Fishbein: I’m sure that I am not the only optometric practice owner. Listening to this with the thought in my head of, okay, great. That all sounds lovely. I cannot imagine my staff member saying that it’s very lovely when you say it. Good job, Mark! Thank you. That sounds very, very nice. But coming from the mouth of a 20 year old pre optometry student who’s a bit of an introvert and doesn’t say much to anyone…

Mark Hinton: Yes.

Bethany Fishbein: How do I get from hearing what you’re saying to letting my staff say something that has that same impact, but sounds like it can come from them? Because I know if he said those words, it would sound like I made him say them. 

Mark Hinton: Well, then it’s a matter of, okay, so using that same idea, how would you say it? So the patient felt important. 

Bethany Fishbein: And they would say something like I would just ask them. If we asked them everything that they needed us to know today, something like that would be their answer.

Mark Hinton: Yeah. Well, okay, so to take it down a little bit more. We knew that there were a number of contact lens patients that either had never worn a contact lens and it was off their radar, or they tried contact lenses 20 years ago when they were 15, and they failed at it. And we know that contact lenses are advancing by the day, the week, the month. And we knew that there was a category of patients that would want to wear contact lens. So that’s the reason for that particular question.

Another way of saying that might be what sports or activities are you involved in where glasses are a little bit annoying for you? Just another way of finding out the information. So years ago, I had a young optician, and I said, so when the patient says, thank you very much, we do not say, no problem, we give grace to grace. So I said, it’s my pleasure. And I went, oh, my God, you sound like ChickFilA. And I said, thank you for noticing. 

And I said, I hear from you that that’s not something that would be comfortable for you to say. And she said, no, it’s like it’s just too space. It’s too overdone. I said, I appreciate that. And I said, I agree with you. I think we learned from each other. How could you acknowledge that person without saying no problem or it’s my pleasure? And she said, for me, I might say happy to help.

And I said, I love it! I’m all in. At least we’re not at least we’re acknowledging and giving grace back to somebody that said thank you. I said, So are you good with happy to help? And she said, yeah, that’s more me. I said perfect. Then say happy to help instead of no problem. And she did. 

So there’s an example for you of any of the listeners that might say, that just doesn’t sound like me. Okay, trust me. We need to weigh and measure the words that we use with people. We need to give grace to grace. We need to make sure that we get rid of ugly words. We need to lead patients where we want them to go and not ask permission to lead them there. Does that give you a pretty good example? 

Bethany Fishbein: It does. It’s kind of finding that balance between I want you to say this and I know that the words really matter, and at the same time, I don’t want to give you a script because I want you to feel like yourself and I want your personality to come through at work. We hired you for your personality. So if I give you somebody else’s words, I’m taking that away a little bit. 

Mark Hinton: Everybody in our office gets our words with the idea that they’re going to develop it with their own words because they don’t know where to start. They keep saying the same thing over and over again. They keep giving the same answers I’m watching capture rates fall through the roof. I’m working with practices that have capture rates today that are 24% because they don’t know the words to say to the patient when the patient says, I just want a copy of my prescription.

Well, guess what? Anybody that works on our team is getting the script, and the script is written so that you can say that script every morning five times in the mirror and every night five times in the mirror. Just say it. I don’t need you to memorize it. I don’t want you to memorize it. I want you to read it. While you’re reading it, I want you to think about what the patient is hearing, not your mouth, not your words coming out of your mouth, because they aren’t working, but what those words on those pages are saying to the patient.

What are they hearing? By the time you do that throughout the week, you have read that 50 times, and by the time you’ve read it 50 times, you have in your words how you’re going to say it, and it’s going to be way better than trying to make something up. Okay, well, just remember, if you need anything, we’re here for you. That is not a good dialogue to get the patient to say in the office when they want their prescription.

Okay, well, did you want me to give you a quote? That’s not what the patient asked for. They asked for their prescription. They think you’re too expensive. It’s not good enough to say, well, you’ve got vision plan benefits. Did you want me to go over those with you? They know that they’ve got vision plan benefits, but they know that their single vision glasses, with their vision plan benefits last time cost them $335, and they already know they can get them at Costco for 119. 

So I’ve got to look at it for what it is. I’ve got to approach it for what it is. And I will tell you this. I appreciate what you said. We have listeners on the phone. We have the younger optometrists who are listening. We have some that suffer social anxiety. I get that. But the point comes where you got to recognize you got to change the way you’re saying it. 

You got to step out there on that limb, on that branch, and recognize that probably most of the reason you’re not taking that chance is because you’re more fearful about what the patient is going to think than believing in what you have to provide them as their doctor. And belief is a choice, and then having the intention behind it to say, I’m going to do the right thing. And the right thing is sometimes really uncomfortable until it becomes comfortable. In psychology, there’s this thing called MUS, which means made up stuff, and we make stuff up in our minds.

And I can tell you that I was so shy that I didn’t speak. Till I was four years old. I know that’s unbelievable, but it’s true. And shyness and anxiety will keep us from being our very best. What’s the worst thing that could happen if you took a chance on yourself? What’s the worst thing that could happen if you took any of those narratives, those monologues, those dialogues, and you made them better?

What’s the worst thing that could happen if you recorded yourself and listened back to and went, ugh, I wouldn’t buy from either.  You change it. So I am very respectful of the listeners who may say, that’s not me. I can’t say it that way. My question is, okay, but will you allow yourself to stay stuck? Because if you really measured how many patients actually purchased the sunglasses to them that you recommended instead of prescribed, and you found out it was one in ten, you would recognize that’s broken.

You got to fix it. Fix it or stay stuck. And I decided to fix it. I did. My mom decided to fix it. He’s not speaking. He’s super shy. I was afraid of the consequences. I was afraid of the shadow. I had anxiety over it. I understand it. Life’s tough. Get a helmet. And in the meantime, what you do is you begin to think, well, if I wanted to change it, if I really wanted the patients to take my advice, I would give them the facts. The sun damages eyes, and it damages it permanently, and I don’t want that for you.

And then a story. Every week in clinic, I see patients with vision loss. Or every week in clinic, I see patients with that same type of growth on their eyes that’s caused by sun damage, and it’s called a pinguecula. I don’t want that to get bigger. So what I’d like to do is for you and I to make a really good plan together so that we reduce the risk of that getting bigger, or if it’s the case of Druzen, so that we reduce the risk of you having vision loss. 

And the way I do that is I prescribe your glasses with filters and treatments that reduce that risk, so we keep your eyes healthy. Does that sound like a good decision for you? That’s such a nice way to have the patient buy into the plan to include sunglasses. It shouldn’t feel anxious. It should feel empathetic. It should feel kind. It should feel caring, and there should be a level of concern behind that. 

Bethany Fishbein: I think that’s such an important message for we get called in also and see those super low capture rate offices, and it’s very often not always, but often a younger doctor who is terrified of the optical department. They’re there for the glaucoma, they’re there for the diabetes. They’re there for the Ocular disease, maybe the IPL, maybe the myopia. And that’s something that they kind of have to have but are very uncomfortable. They’ll tell you, right, I’m not a salesperson. I’m very uncomfortable selling. 

Mark Hinton: Yeah, you know what? Good point, Bethany, and I’m so glad that you brought that up, because in all of my practices, I work with my doctors to not look at the optical as retail and also to look to the fact if they feel like they’re selling, they’re already contributing to the selling by not prescribing and gaining the patient agreement. If it’s a recommendation, it usually turns into a handoff. That is, this is Mark, my optician. He’s going to help you with your glasses.

Oh, Lord. Now I’m going to have to sell. And that’s going to be a reflection on the doctor, and it usually leads to something like we discussed, we talked about, she might be interested in. When I go to my other doctors, they’re not afraid to tell me what I need. If I need a pacemaker, my doctor is going to say, Mark, your heart is not beating regularly. I’m going to prescribe a pacemaker.

We need to get it working right, and I’m going to go, okay, but if my doctor says, Mark, you might want to think about a pacemaker, I’ll have you talk to my assistant about it. The assistant comes in and says, Mark might be interested in a pacemaker. That’s as silly as saying, Mark might be interested in sunglasses. 

So I get it. I get the uncomfortable part of the optical, the clinical oh, baby, that’s my jam. But the optical should not be considered as a retail environment. It’s a pharmacy. It’s a pharmacy for what you want filled for your patient, for the eyewear portion of their health care. Every lens, every lens treatment, every coding that you prescribe for that patient is going to help them gain an advantage or help them avoid a disadvantage.

Forget the frame part. That’s the jam for optical. And if you look at it as the optical pharmacy and you forget thinking about it as the retail aspect, you’re going to feel far more comfortable about the reason behind the why that you’re prescribing it for the patient. And it’s risky when they go elsewhere because they may not get it filled the way you want it filled. 

So it is my optical expert is going to fill because the patient saw the advantage or made the decision during the exam to have it filled with the why. Well, to reduce the risk of vision loss over time and the logic so that we reduce the risk of sun damage. So I’m glad you shared that. If we simply look at our optical differently through different colored glasses, if you will, than the way we look at it now, you connect it to the medical eye part of it, and we should be looking at it as that. 

If you’ve got a patient that’s developing cataracts, their acuity is going to drop. Should they continue to wear gray sunglasses while they’re developing cataracts? No. You want to now use your medical knowledge to switch them out of a gray sunglass and move them to brown sunglasses, because it’s going to heighten contrast where they’re losing contrast. It’s going to heighten acuity where they’re having acuity loss.

And as I share this, I can imagine that listeners to the podcast would say, well, this is just as important for an early AMD patient, and you would be absolutely right about that. So optical ties into medical. 

Bethany Fishbein: Absolutely. And that idea that having that discussion, making optical part of the eye health treatment plan, getting alignment between you, the doctor and the patient on the treatment plan, which includes appropriate eyewear for so many of the things that patients come in with obviously refractive concerns, but also cataract and AMD as well. Having your team understand and the doctor understand that them filling that prescription is just making sure that the patient gets what they need. 

Mark Hinton: Yeah. The doctor needs to think of the optician as their optical pharmacist. Their optical pharmacist not going off to Costco’s optical pharmacist, I don’t know. Or Walmart’s optical pharmacist. I don’t know if they were working on the loading doc last week or not. I don’t know if the Pupilometer is 3 mm off in each eye or not. We should be very concerned about patients taking prescriptions and having them filled elsewhere.

Bethany Fishbein: And sometimes they’re going online and they’re their own optical pharmacists.

Mark Hinton: Yeah. And they forget to add AR, and then they wonder why they can’t see out of the glasses. 

Bethany Fishbein: Mark, this is so much information. Before we end the episode here, though, I don’t want to let you get away with it. You talked about all the things that you shouldn’t say when somebody asks for a copy of the prescription. What is the thing that you should say? 

Mark Hinton: Carol, I hear you, and I want you happy. I would really appreciate it if you would share with us a cost range that we should be respectful of for you so that we could make your glasses. That way, you and I could both feel confident that your glasses are made exactly the way we’re prescribing them for you today without any errors or compromise. Would you permit us to do that for you? 

Bethany Fishbein: What percentage of patients say, sure?

Mark Hinton: We have a 97% capture rate in our office, and every day patients ask for their prescription, but the logic in that is, oh, they’re willing to work within my price range, and, oh, they might make a mistake on my glasses. So our percentage is, if we didn’t do that, we already know that we would probably because we’re good at prescribing, we would probably be close to 60% or more, but we’re not. 

We’re in the 90s. So you could imagine to give you an example, most practices that I work with that are in the mid to low 40s. They move to 75% within a week using a dialogue like that. But you have to have affordable choices in place. So that means you’ve got to be willing to buy frames at the right pricing. And we use a lot of close outs. We’re thrilled with them. They’re brand new. They’re named Brand. And maybe the power practice has opportunities for patients to be able to buy better. 

And then we also have negotiated with our laboratory to use non branded, high quality progressives that are digitally processed direct surface for progressives that cost us little to nothing. And then also buying stock single vision lenses. And we don’t edge any lenses in our office, but we made an agreement with our lab to charge us an Edging charge for our single vision stock lenses that we buy for $10 a set that are Poly AR so that now we can compete with these big box stores. 

What does it take? It takes ten minutes to help the patient. My profit is roughly $200. I’m happy. They’re happy. Their circumstances may change in the future to where now they want to buy our IC Berlin or our Phosphorus Bocas. And you do the due diligence. You go out and you mystery shop to find out what they’re charging. On the average, I don’t go for the low end, but on average, what’s the average for a pair of progressives and a pair of single vision at Walmart or Sam’s Club or Costco or America’s Best or Eye Mart Express? 

And then you don’t have to be the lowest, but you can be in the range. And we also found that when we asked patients, what cost range should we be respectful of that we can work with? They almost always quoted higher than whatever our bundles were. And that’s what we work with.

Bethany Fishbein: Mark, thank you so much for taking the time and for doing this today. For somebody who wants to talk to you or wants to hear more from you, how does somebody get in touch with you? 

Mark Hinton: Mark@eyefacilitate.com. It’s Mark with a K. 

Bethany Fishbein: Awesome! And for anyone listening who wants to learn more about what we do, you can reach us at powerpractice.com. Thank you again for listening!