Optometry Strategic Planning

Optometry is among the Healthcare professions that are rapidly changing. In a rapidly changing environment, the leader is the one who stimulates change. An Optometrist’s outstanding leadership directly affects the performance and the success of the organization in the future. An Optometrist with sound strategic planning can remarkably improve the value of patient care. Honesty, ethics, integrity, and instilling trust are no doubt the most needed traits in Optometry to gain support from partners, employers, employees, and customers. However, the rapid changing world of Optometry and the need for a continuous stream of capital to keep up the speed of the development in new technologies, innovations in care delivery, and diagnostics increases the pressure on the Optometry business to keep the focus on its mission, monitor performance, continuously improve quality of care and sustain relationships with stakeholders.

Organizations with good strategic planning are companies with the highest productivity, the highest rate of employee and customer satisfaction, deliver sophisticated care, and have the lowest costs. The objective of strategic planning should be to find ways to co-create value with the stakeholders, communicate and promote co-created value, and be able to capture the value. Transformational leadership is the best of different types of leadership that is suited for this objective. Transformational Optometrists are motivators, facilitators, educators, and visionaries who align their objectives with those of their followers. A transformational model of leadership focuses more on internal value-based incentives and less on external reward-based incentives. Transformational leaders have strong work ethics and know when structural and procedural modifications are required to stay competitive. They are excellent in resource allocation, and their strategic planning is grounded in the company’s mission, vision, and values and is based on the analyses of the company’s internal and external environment where it operates.

To achieve this objective the Optometrist should be able to apply and rely on a set of tools and perform series of analyses that include: SWOT analysis, Gap analysis, marketing planning, forecasting, regression analysis, NPV, IRR, as well as a plan for growth and other plans that lead to a business plan. The business plan largely remains one of the most important components of strategic planning because it helps sell the plan. All these tools and analyses will be detailed in future posts. However, the main takeaway of this post should be that the Optometrist should keep in mind that good strategic planning is an on-going process that great leaders pursue and it mainly has three objectives: providing high-quality care, reducing costs, and providing care to the greatest number of patients.