Developing a dry eye clinic, part 2: The traditional dry eye practice

In order to build a true dry eye practice, it is first necessary to make an open commitment to care for the dry eye patient. As pointed out in part 1 of this series, if you build a dry eye practice, dry eye patients will find you and they will come to your practice. In part 2, I will explore how to develop a traditional dry eye practice. The protocols for this type of practice can easily be layered onto your existing exams and can be done so without making any capital investments.The nuts and bolts of a traditional dry eye practice are actually the building blocks on which an advanced dry eye practice is built. Every aspect of the traditional dry eye practice is a necessary part of comprehensive dry eye referral practices. Perhaps a better name than “traditional” might be “foundational.” Not unlike my beloved fitness program CrossFit, all of the individual “pieces/parts” of your new dry eye service are already in place. The magic will be in how you utilize these elements as a more effective whole, just as the magic of CrossFit is in how traditional exercises are combined in a unique fashion to more efficiently increase fitness.