Dr. Mark Kontos discusses his article about the return on investment of post-refractive patients in Ophthalmology Management magazine. A transcript appears below.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, this is Dr. Mark Kontos. I'm in private practice up in the Pacific Northwest, and our practice focuses primarily on cataract surgery, with an emphasis on advanced lens technology. And over the years, I've been noticing that the number of patients that we have that have a history of laser vision correction has been steadily increasing. A couple years ago, that number was around 10% of our surgery cases, and currently that number really runs around closer to 20%.
So I've noticed that growth, and it made me look a little closer at this group. And the reason for that is just that they seem to be a little bit different in terms of the choices that they make versus standard cataract surgery patients. And some of the things that we've noticed is that, number one, this is a group that's growing. There's more and more of these patients, which makes sense when you think about LASIK. Back in the heyday of LASIK, in the early 2000s, approximately 14 million eyes were treated between 1997 and about 2004, and those patients back then were about 30 years old.
Now they're in their 50s, and they're looking at cataract surgery changes. We find that those patients tend to choose cataract surgery sooner than the standard patients, who don't have a history of laser vision correction. And the other thing is is we notice that those patients are much more likely to choose advanced lens technology versus patients who don't have a history of laser vision correction. Almost 80%, in our practice, of those patients choose to have some type of specialty lens placed in their eye, versus about 25% of patients who don't have a history of laser vision correction. That's a significant difference between those two patients, and when we look at the revenue that comes into our practice, we find that actually more revenue comes in, on a percentage basis, from patients who have a history of laser vision correction, who choose advanced lens technology, than the group of patients that don't have laser vision correction.
And so for us, we want to, of course, identify those patients out in the community, and bring them into our office for consultation to describe the options that they have available to them. And so we've created kind of an emphasis on finding those patients, through social media, through other marketing efforts that we do. We look back pm all of the patients that we've done laser vision correction on in the past, and start trying to re-contact them to see how they're doing. And maybe get them in for an evaluation. Because we feel that going forward, those patients are going to be critical in generating important revenue for our surgery center, and also allowing us to have them enjoy the benefits of advanced lens technology, as opposed to just standard lenses. So again, we're working hard on that group of patients. We've identified them as a special group, and we think they're very important in our practice going forward. OM
