Running an eye care practice today means striving for top-notch patient care while balancing never-ending operational pressure. From patient scheduling and intake to billing, staffing, and inventory, every part of your practice depends on efficient workflows. The end of the year is the perfect time to re-evaluate your processes, see what’s driving results, and identify areas of improvement.
Boosting efficiency before the New Year doesn’t mean overhauling your entire practice. Small adjustments in key areas can reduce friction, support your staff, and help your team handle higher patient volumes with less stress. In this post, we’ll review 12 practical strategies to streamline your optometry or ophthalmology practice and set your team up for a more successful year ahead.
A great first step to winning time back next year is automating how patients schedule appointments and complete intake forms. If you're still relying on phone tag and paper forms, consider implementing online scheduling so patients can book appointments 24/7 and staff don’t have to manually enter each appointment.
Online digital intake forms can also save front‑desk staff time, reduce paperwork during check‑in, enable faster eligibility checks, and help staff focus more on patient care than administrative tasks. Electronic scheduling also reduces no‑shows and late cancellations if you pair it with automated reminders and two-way texting. This helps keep appointment slots full and your daily schedule stable.
The end of the year is a great time to understand what’s actually working to bring patients into your practice. Look at metrics like website traffic, social media engagement, appointment request trends, paid ads results, email marketing performance, etc. Identify the channels that drove new patients this year and the ones that didn’t produce much return.
When you understand what worked, you can build a stronger plan for next year, whether it’s in-house or with the support of a marketing agency. With a clear plan and realistic goals, you can start the new year with marketing efforts that drive real ROI.
To learn more, check out our blog: 10 Optometry Marketing Strategies and Ideas to Grow Your Practice.
Manual charting, billing, and inventory management tasks can quietly steal time without staff realizing it. Integrating automation into your workflows wherever possible is key to giving your team breathing room and reducing errors.
Automation tools can suggest appropriate billing codes based on exam notes, flag missing information before claim submission, and even assist with clinical documentation. Automated patient communication via SMS can also help reduce no-shows, accelerate payments, and keep patients informed. By removing repetitive administrative burdens, staff can focus more on taking care of patients. That improves throughput without increasing headcount, which is a significant advantage if staffing is tight.
Billing is often one of the most time-consuming and error-prone parts of running a practice. When even one step in the revenue cycle isn’t optimized, the effects show up fast with lost revenue, slow reimbursements, rising A/R, and added stress on your staff. As you wrap up the year, now is the time to take a quick pulse on your revenue cycle.
A few simple checks can help you start 2026 stronger:
Identify your top denial drivers, confirm any upcoming payer policy changes, and make sure staff workflows are aligned before heading into Q1. Even small adjustments can have a major impact on cash flow.
If billing has become a constant source of stress, or if you’re struggling to keep up with payer rules and claim volume, Sightview’s RCM services can help. Our team specializes in optometry and ophthalmology billing and can lower denial rates, speed up claim submissions, and improve overall cash flow health while taking administrative burden off your internal team.
To learn more, check out our blog: Best Practices for a Smoother Eye Care Billing Process.
For many practices, optical is a major revenue stream. Given rising wholesale costs and inflationary pressures, optimizing how you manage and sell optical products is more important than ever. With 71% of providers reporting increased eyewear costs in 2025, optimizing pricing, inventory, and sales workflows is crucial to protect your margins in 2026.
Some key areas to focus on:
By implementing these strategies, your optical shop can become more profitable, even in a tough market.
Patient engagement plays a key role in satisfaction and retention. Modern patients expect convenience, transparency, and communication. Provide channels for two‑way communication, such as online messaging or texting, so patients can ask questions, confirm appointments, or discuss billing without calling the office.
Today, patient experience is shaped by more than just clinical outcomes and smooth scheduling. It’s also important to make your patients feel heard and special. Simple touches like educational content, loyalty rewards, birthday wishes, and sharing patient stories on your social media show that your practice sees them as more than just appointments on your calendar.
Relying solely on traditional exams and eyewear sales can limit growth, especially in today’s challenging economy. Diversifying your services can add stability and open new revenue streams. Look for products and services that complement your core offerings: dry‑eye treatments, eyelid cleaning solutions, vision therapy, myopia management, advanced diagnostics, or supplements. Adding these products and services—when your team can handle it—not only helps you better meet patient needs but also future-proofs your revenue.
Rising costs affect more than just eyewear: supplies, lab fees, and vendor pricing can drift upward without notice. Make vendor reviews a regular part of your quarterly to-do list and evaluate pricing, delivery costs, restock fees, and minimum order requirements. Consolidate suppliers where possible to improve leverage and reduce overhead. If you haven’t already, consider joining an optometric buying group or alliance. Group purchasing power may help you get discounts or better terms that are hard to negotiate as an individual practice.
Even the busiest practices lose revenue and retention in the quiet gaps between visits. Review the full patient journey and identify where people fall off:
These drop-off points add up and often go unnoticed. Fixing just one drop-off point (such as tightening checkout-to-optical handoff) can help you increase retention and boost revenue without increasing patient volume.
Data gives you a clear picture of how your practice is performing and eliminates guesswork. If you don’t already have a solid reporting strategy in place, the end of the year is the perfect time to build one. Start by identifying the key metrics that matter most to your practice, such as appointment adherence, patient volume, optical sales, inventory turnover, and RCM indicators.
Then, schedule weekly or monthly check-ins to help you identify patterns like repeat no-show days, slow-moving optical inventory, or rising claim denials, so you can tackle them before they significantly impact revenue.
Make sure your team is part of the process. When everyone can see the data, it creates alignment, shared accountability, and often sparks ideas you otherwise wouldn’t notice on your own.
Collect feedback from staff about what works and what slows them down. Their real‑world insight can highlight process bottlenecks and help you adjust workflows to better fit the team’s strengths and struggles.
Also, look at how confident your team feels using your EHR and Practice Management system. Even the best systems require people who know how to use them effectively. Build a simple training plan that reinforces key processes, such as scheduling workflows, charting shortcuts, billing steps, and optical sales. Small refreshers go a long way in reducing errors and ensuring a consistent experience for every patient.
End your 12 days of efficiency by setting clear goals for 2026. Use the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, to keep your team aligned and help make progress-tracking easier.
A few examples of SMART goals for eye care practices:
Share the goals with your team, assign owners, and review progress regularly. SMART goals will help you walk into 2026 confident and prepared for a stronger year.
These 12 steps are small, intentional improvements that build on each other. The needs of every optometry, ophthalmology, and optical practice are different, so focus on the areas that will make the biggest impact for your team. Small efficiency improvements will help your team spend less time on paperwork, reduce errors, capture more revenue, and give patients a better experience.
If you’re ready to take the next step, explore how Sightview brings scheduling, EHR, inventory, billing, and patient communication together in one connected platform, so your practice can move into the new year better positioned for growth.
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