Welcome to Optometry Simplified.
In this weekly newsletter, I've curated the best resources to help you grow personally and professionally.
My mission is to find what's best for my patients and my practice.
Here's what I've found...
Links I Liked
Are you misdiagnosing your burnout?
Steve Vargo, OD, interviews Luke Mathers, an optometrist and stress resilience expert, about burnout. They unpack how burnout differs from being bored (or bored out), which also differs from feeling checked out. The key to resilience, then, is knowing how to differentiate between them and seek their unique antidotes. Eye Own a Business
AI-era patients present different challenges than Google-era patients.
"Generative AI typically does not hand patients 10 conflicting links as Google searches used to. It returns a single fluent account, with an onset, a mechanism, and a conclusion, and then it refines that account in conversation until everything fits." To diagnose and treat accurately, we sometimes have to unwind the tidy narrative AI has already built with our patient before we can build the real one. MedpageToday
Protecting your practice starts with understanding your biggest risks.
PPP Practice Risk Assessment helps identify potential compliance, billing, HR, and operational gaps that could be impacting your growth and profitability — before they become bigger problems.
Research I'm Reading
How do you differentiate between high myopia and early glaucoma?
A new article examined various OCT findings to help distinguish glaucoma from myopia. They found that dips and/or depressions of the TSNIT curve were most helpful in determining which is which. Here's the original article in Ophthalmology. Here is a summary.
Deep Thoughts
When I worked in a referral-only practice, I thought my job was the hard part. A patient would show up already diagnosed, already worried, already willing. I'd dive into the case.
I didn't understand what I actually had until I left.
In primary care, that patient doesn't exist yet. You have to build them. Someone has to notice something's wrong before the patient does. Someone has to say it out loud — "I'm concerned about something you didn't know was there," or worse, "I can't fix this, you need someone who can." That conversation is uncomfortable almost every time. And in a referral practice, somebody else already had it. All I had to do was open the chart.
This matters because I mistook that invisible labor for something that didn't exist. I thought I was good at ocular disease. I was good at ocular disease once someone else had done the harder, more human work of detection and disclosure.
When I moved to primary care, that was the first thing I found I wasn't good at. I wanted the patient to just arrive, pre-packaged, the way they always had. Instead I had to figure out how to notice, how to say the hard thing clearly, and how to do it fast enough to still run a normal day.
What this actually means is that comprehensive optometry isn't really "know a bit of everything." That description undersells it and makes it sound like a compromise.
The actual skill is narrower and harder to name: building the muscle to detect, disclose, and move a patient from their annual exam into a deeper evaluation, on purpose and as part of a system, instead of hoping it happens naturally.
Most of us have never learned how to intentionally build that muscle. Nobody sat us down and said, "Here's how you have an uncomfortable conversation with a patient who came in for glasses." Here's how you do it in six minutes. Here's how you do it consistently, for every patient who needs it, not just the ones where it's obvious.
That's what I actually mean when I talk about a comprehensive optometry system. Not breadth for its own sake. A repeatable way to do the uncomfortable thing on purpose, every time, instead of waiting for it to happen.
Can you do me a favor? If you found any of these resources helpful, share this newsletter with one of our colleagues!
See you next week!
--Kyle Klute, OD, FAAO