Innovation Time

Delegates from Estonia, France, Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, Jordan, Switzerland, Estonia, US, the UK and Ireland attended the inaugural ESCRS Practice Development Weekend at the Four Seasons Hotel, Dublin Ireland. The meeting, held on November 12 and 13, was the first Practice Development session held outside the annual ESCRS Congress and it is planned to consider similar initiatives in the future following the success of the meeting.

'We have a Practice Development session at our main congress, but a lot of people cannot attend it because they are busy presenting or going to symposia,' said ESCRS president-elect Peter Barry in his closing remarks.

'I think we have got great value over the last two days because people have had more time to participate in the workshops and masterclass,' he said. 'The message is everybody has enjoyed this weekend and my personal view is that we should take this model forward and repeat it again in some city, perhaps once a year.'

Opening the meeting, Paul Rosen, chairman of the ESCRS Practice Development Committee, said the purpose of the Practice Development programme is to get business and management experts to advise doctors on how they can run their practices successfully.

'We have been lucky to be able to attract some of the top opinion leaders in their fields to speak on topics which affect ophthalmologists in their day-to-day practice,' he said.

Driving innovation

Tim Clover, CEO of Optegra, a chain of 10 eye hospitals in the UK and Germany, delivered the keynote lecture on Innovation in Ophthalmology. The model Optegra had developed, he said, was to integrate their operations right at the beginning of the product development process and to influence the market rather than just to react to it.

'We have produced this model,' he said, 'which basically says if you provide the best facilities, you would hope that you attract the best surgeons.

'If you get those two things right, you should get the best outcomes,' he said. 'If you can get the best outcomes, in my view, long-term you are the one that wins.'

He said that in the future there would be a huge amount of consolidation in ophthalmology. 'I don't think ophthalmology can survive with single-handed practices or two or three ophthalmologists working together,' said Mr Clover. 'Technology is too far advanced, too fast and too well developed for that to be a sustainable model,' he said. 'I think the model for the future is multiple ophthalmologists with all the technology under the one roof,' he said.

Comfort zone

Rod Solar of LiveseySolar Practice Builders said that ophthalmologists who wanted to grow their practices needed to step out of their comfort zones. 'You have to get into areas where you are not comfortable. I am talking about doing things a little differently to the way you have done them in the past,' he said.

Practical financial issues were discussed by David McCaffrey, a partner in MedAccount Services. He told the meeting that ophthalmologists must be diligent in keeping records of all their business transactions and in particular to separate their personal transactions from their business transactions. The issue of record keeping was also addressed by Paul McGinn, barrister at law, who said good record keeping would help ophthalmologists to avoid unnecessary legal actions which could prove to be very expensive.

Mr Solar, in his second presentation to the meeting, discussed the importance of social media for ophthalmologists. The meeting concluded with a Practice Development Masterclass delivered by Prof Keith Willey which included a discussion on the new London Business School/ESCRS Case Study.

A full report of this meeting will appear on the ESCRS Practice Development website at www.escrs.org/practice-development