I’m Michael Patterson from Eye Centers of Tennessee, headquartered in Crossville, Tennessee. We've got 8 locations and 18 doctors, and we have a practice that does a multi-disciplinary approach when it comes to ophthalmology.  We practice with cornea, retina, glaucoma, cataracts, refractive—pretty much everything besides pediatric surgery.

So, the question is, what have I done to make my practice and my surgery center more efficient in the last year, and the answer is pretty simple. We live in a rural area of America where people have to travel a long ways, and at the end of the day, we decided simply to invest in our people.

A lot of doctors try to get by with maybe 1 scribe or 2 scribes; I have 4 scribes, my father uses 3 scribes, my partner uses 3 to 4 scribes, and we did that because we wanted our patient experience to be better. So instead of worrying about whether or not we would make more money as individual owners, our thought was, let's hire more people, let's bring more people in that can attend to more people at the bedside, at the consult area for cataract surgery, or for just a normal dry eye patient or a normal diabetic patient.

And so instead of trying to be lean with staff, what we decided was, we're going to see as many people as we can with as many staff as we can. So we have a little bit higher threshold to hire people; we try to stay a little bit higher than what the metrics are in the country when people talk about how many people you should have in your staff and so that for us has allowed our patients to have a little bit more focused care with the staff, a little bit more hands-on time and has allowed us to just be doctors.

Our optometrists feel the same way. They have plenty of work-up technicians. Our optometrists don't have to do most of their refractions. Our optometrists simply get to take care of patients and treat diseases, and for them it gives them a better life. It gives us better lives as ophthalmologists, and it's made our staff and our patients much happier.

So, if you're looking for a way to become more efficient, consider the addition of people. Even though it sounds less efficient, it will lead to a much more efficient process for your practice financially as well as a happy coefficient for your staff.

Transcript edited for clarity.