5 Steps to a Healthy Work-Life Balance for Optometrists
Highlights
- You must cultivate a healthy work-life balance to run a successful optometry practice.
- To balance responsibilities from home and at your practice, create a workable schedule, manage employees effectively, and focus on money management.
- You can support a work-life balance with integrated optometry EHR software that automates practice management, including scheduling, insurance, and billing.
Cultivating a healthy work-life balance is crucial to running a successful optometry practice and preventing burnout. To balance your home and practice responsibilities, focus on creating a flexible schedule, hiring excellent staff, and staying on top of your practice’s cash flow and accounting.
You can also use an integrated optometry EHR to automate practice management tasks to save time and money.
Why Is Maintaining a Healthy Work-Life Balance So Important?
The American Optometric Association (AOA) reported on results from a survey published by the Mayo Clinic on burnout in healthcare providers in the U.S. According to the survey, nearly 60% of healthcare providers, including ophthalmologists, feel they don’t have a healthy work-life balance.
Around 40% of providers who answered survey questions reported feeling burnt out due to the lack of balance between work and personal life.
The study examined burnout indicators such as emotional exhaustion, depression, and depersonalization. According to the AOA, struggling with these factors can lead to irritability, fatigue, and high blood pressure. They can also negatively impact your mental health, causing issues in your personal and professional life.
5 Ways to Cultivate a Healthy Work-Life Balance for Optometrists
To combat burnout and its consequences, you can take action to cultivate a healthy work-life balance. The following are five tips to balance the responsibilities of running your optometry practice and having enough time for yourself and your family at home.
1. Build a Flexible Schedule
Burnout is often caused by inflexible schedules requiring long hours and not leaving time for personal needs. Building a flexible schedule that works for you, your family, and your practice is essential for a healthy work-life balance.
Your schedule should give you time to provide quality patient care, handle practice management tasks, and spend time with your family outside of work. Ask yourself the following questions to determine what hours and times you can and should work each week:
- What daily tasks must I perform, and how long do they take?
- What are my family’s needs (kids, spouse, parents, etc.)?
- What personal hobbies or activities do I need to build time for?
- What household responsibilities do I have, and how much time do they need?
When developing your schedule, focus on productivity, profitability, and sustainability for yourself, your staff, and your practice. Consider scheduling approaches in resources such as Gary Keller’s The One Thing or Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt.
2. Consider Home Life Responsibilities
To create a work-life balance that meets everyone’s needs, consider your responsibilities at home. While assessing what needs your attention, focus on flexible solutions for your schedule to determine what you can do to cultivate more balance.
For example, if you have young children, consider child care when creating a schedule for your practice. Can you and your partner work out a mutually beneficial schedule to cover child care without using daycare? Would it be economical and practical to hire a nanny or au pair?
Consider all responsibilities at home and treat them as equal to responsibilities at your practice to create a balance that works for both.
3. Manage Employees Effectively
How you manage your staff can dictate your personal happiness. Cultivating a respectful, engaging workplace for yourself and your staff is vital for a healthy work-life balance. Consider employee scheduling and how it will impact your ability to have a life outside of your practice.
You may opt for several part-time employees or a few dedicated full-time employees for your practice. Consider offering your employees flexible schedules to boost performance and give everyone more balance between work and home. For example, you might build schedules that allow one day off per week or provide benefits to employees who work 32 hours rather than a full 40.
How you treat your employees affects their productivity and loyalty. This affects your ability to grow your practice and tend to your personal relationships.
4. Optimize Cash Flow
To have a work-life balance, focus on optimizing your practice’s cash flow. When you build good accounting practices and maximize your revenue for the long term, you have more financial stability, which leads to more personal flexibility.
Consider using automated practice management software that offers cash flow features like automated billing, claims management, and dashboard reporting capabilities. Better cash flow means you can pay yourself more, pay off debt, and make financial projections to understand the future success of your practice.
5. Perform Ongoing Analysis
To balance life at your practice and at home, you must continually analyze your practice to ensure success. The more insights you have about how your practice performs, the easier it is to focus on specific areas of improvement rather than overworking yourself.
Ongoing analysis means accessing practice-wide reports to understand revenue, profit, and financial liabilities. It also means taking time for professional and personal development through resources like books, conferences, and podcasts. Consider setting aside a few minutes daily to analyze some aspect of your practice or personal life and make improvements.
How Using the Right Optometry EHR Helps You Balance Your Home and Work Life
The EHR software you use at your optometry practice can significantly impact your work-life balance. Using an automated, integrated optometry EHR like RevolutionEHR frees up your time from performing administrative tasks, such as scheduling and billing, so you have more time to focus on other areas of your life.
RevolutionEHR is an all-in-one system that lets you handle EHR documentation, reporting, and practice management in one location. Our highly customized features allow you to streamline all aspects of your practice to build a flexible schedule that works for you and your family.
Through ancillary features like RevIntake, RevConnect, RevClear, and RevPayments, you can:
- Automate patient registration
- Allow for online scheduling
- Send out automated appointment reminders
- Launch email campaigns and communicate with patients through digital tools
- Accept credit card, online, and other forms of payment
- Automate insurance claims submission and achieve a 98.06% acceptance rate
Support Your Work-Life Balance With RevolutionEHR
RevolutionEHR can help you achieve a healthy work-life balance so you can grow your practice while taking care of your personal needs. Schedule a demo today and see how our software gives you the freedom to focus on what’s most important in your professional and personal life.
