Remote Optometry Challenges

COVID-19 has forced Optometrists and created an urgency to adopt telehealth and telemedicine. Some strategies and measures are a direct response and therefore temporary in terms of the precautions that should be taken during the pandemic and relate to how practitioners should deal with preventing the spread of the disease, whereas others are rather more long-term strategies that can spam well beyond the time of the pandemic. Optometrists are making practice management and business adjustments that mainly focus on transitioning to remote work. The business adjustments include introducing or upgrading existing hardware and software solutions to keep patients recurring visits and referral of new patients ensuring a sustainable business and steady growth.

Away from precautionary, disease containment, and business technology adjustments one important element that strongly impacts the aspect of the relationship between the patient and the practitioner as we move from face to face to remote is Trust. Trust is the result of four elements: competence, logic, empathy, and reliability. Each of those four elements that are central to building and maintaining trust in the patient-practitioner relationship has changed in a particular way as we shifted from face-to-face to remote consultation.

When building and maintaining competence Optometrists always consider the image and the setting that communicate professionalism and convey the guaranteed message about the practitioner’s eligibility and credibility. Logic is a very important element in building and maintaining trust since Optometrists need to prove to the patient that remote working provides comparable quality of care as an on-site visit. Many practitioners share their screen with the patients in a way to add logic to the consultation and show the patient that his record history is at the basis of the decision-making process. Empathy is significantly hard to convey in telemedicine, the more your telecommunication technology is subject to glitches and errors the more difficult will be to comfort the patient and show empathy. Optometrists should be able to provide reliable services and any question that arises after the teleconsultation. Therefore, patients should be given many options to call the office or the practitioner whenever they want to inquire about an issue.