{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Optometrists Building Empires","title":"The 2:15 Problem: Missed Calls, Burnout, and the Half of Optometry That Is Running on Empty","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":762,"description":"## The short version\n\nHalf of U.S. optometrists are burned out, and what separates the burned out half from the other half is not effort or love of patients. It is workflow. This episode uses one imaginary patient, Denise, to show how a practice can lose revenue and lose its doctor at the same time, from the same root cause: too much happening at once and no signal anyone can act on.\n\n## The 2:15 problem\n\nDenise is not real, but she behaves like a lot of your patients. Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a parking lot, phone in hand, 15 minutes before her next meeting starts. That gap is the only reason she is calling today. Meanwhile your front desk is checking out the 1 o'clock exam and the rest of the team is working insurance. Nobody is slacking. Everybody is doing the job they were hired to do. The phone rings four times, five times, and she is gone.\n\nOut of 10 people like Denise, how many call back? Most owners guess six, seven, even eight. The research puts it closer to one and a half. About 85 percent never call again.\n\n## Why it never gets fixed\n\nThe number stings, but the bigger issue is that the call left no evidence. No voicemail. No note in the system. No report unless you go pull one from the phone system, assuming your phone system even lets you. Denise never appears anywhere. Three weeks later the schedule is soft and you spend a Sunday afternoon researching marketing companies in the OD groups. That was never the problem. You did not have a marketing problem, you had a 2:15 problem, and the 2:15 problem never generated a signal anyone could act on.\n\n## The burnout numbers\n\n- A University of Colorado study of U.S. optometrists found 53.6 percent burned out, at varying levels. Roughly one in two doctors.\n- The entire distance between the most burned out doctors in the country and the least was four tenths of a clinical day, roughly three to four hours on a given day.\n- More clinic time correlated with more burnout. More patients correlated with more...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/YL2_iApAQKMNenVMuJU6VxjEqr2JuXxMbz-e8njM13g/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83N2Jh/YWIyNmE5MGNiZTA3/YTRhZDQ2Nzc2OTUw/YzQyOS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}