Thomas McKercher, an architect who works with MARCO Ophthalmics to plan and design state-of-the-art ophthalmic facilities, suggests the following to maximize the efficiency of your practice without compromising patient care: Try redesigning your floorspace to remove history, visual acuity and refraction from the exam lane and place them in individual rooms (one for history and visual acuity, one for refraction). Not only does this make the rooms more efficient, but because they're designed to handle specific tasks the rooms can be smaller. And one physician can see as many as 10 patients per hour out of two rooms.

Also, because the exam lanes no longer need to have a phoropter, the size of those lanes can be reduced quite a bit.

This change can increase the number of patients you see per day, use less floorspace and increase patient satisfaction by providing faster service with less waiting time -- all without lowering the quality of patient care.