Dr. Steve Rice chose to pursue the field of optometry for a very specific and very estimable purpose.
“I knew I wanted to work in healthcare,” Dr. Rice reflects. “I knew I wanted to help people, and I knew I wanted to be a contributing member of a community. Providing people with good care is the most important thing.”
Dr. Rice’s passion for people and compassionate care is a sentiment he inspired in his children. His son Kevin and his daughter Stephanie, as well as his daughter-in-law, Sandy, are all optometrists who work with Dr. Rice at various Vision Clinic locations in Southwest Missouri.
After a long career as an independent practitioner, today Dr. Rice serves as the CEO of Vision Clinic and an Administrator of Vision Source Missouri. Vision Source is the largest network of private practice optometrists with 3,100 locally owned practice locations in the United States. Dr. Rice’s growing practice group in Southwest Missouri includes five locations, 88 staff members, and 12 doctors.
While Dr. Rice focuses more on administrative efficiency today than on performing patient exams, his singular commitment to the highest patient care has never wavered.
“Our patients have always been our north star,” he says. “We are focused on the patient experience and providing the best patient care. The biggest compliment that I can get is when a patient comes in the first time, and they say to me later, ‘I knew as soon as I walked in the door, this was the right place to be.’ Our interactions with our patients aren’t just transactions. We aim to build lifelong relationships with each one.
Creating Exceptional Experiences for Patients Using Exceptional Technology
For Dr. Rice, exceptional patient care involves leveraging the best technology to help his team make accurate diagnostic decisions.
“When I first learned about [Carrrot, formerly Virtual Field] in 2020, I jumped on it,” he recalls. “The thing I’ve been impressed with about [Carrot] is that it’s always worked. It’s done everything we’ve asked of it. We quickly realized it was clinically sound, exams are easy to run, we can easily access, capture, and compare data.”
Adding Carrot subscriptions to his Vision Clinic practices also helped accelerate patient care and streamline appointment workflows.
“When we solely relied on our Humphreys for visual field testing, our diagnostic room would get hung up,” said Dr. Rice. “Now that we have [Carrot headsets] in our offices, we can put patients in exam rooms and conduct their visual field testing, and it keeps the diagnostic room open for OCT and VEP, and other tests, helping with patient flow.”
The Financial Benefits of Carrot’s Subscription-Based Model
In his role as CEO, Dr. Rice is hyper-focused on patient care, practice efficiency, and, of course, financial profitability. For him, Carrot’s monthly subscription offers the greatest possible potential for turning equipment investment into profit.
“Typically, I’d rather buy a device, let it depreciate and move on,” he said. “The challenge with new technology is that it’s typically expensive, and while at its onset it earns the highest reimbursement rate, as time goes on, the reimbursement goes down. The result is that the tools you rely on to provide what becomes considered a standard of care become challenging to profit from. If an instrument costs $20,000 and you only make $20 off each exam, you have to conduct a lot of exams for the finances to make sense. Plus, technology advances so fast that you might not have even paid off an instrument before it becomes outdated.
“What I like about [Carrot] is the affordability of a monthly subscription fee. You’re keeping up with technology, and the software is regularly being updated, new exams added, and it’s durable. As a CEO, it’s a comfort.”
Empowering Consistency of Care with Carrot
Dr. Rice has added to his Carrot subscriptions by strategically ordering additional headsets to add to his offices. He knows growing his fleet is a strategic workflow imperative and an assurance of continuity of care.
“Back when my original partner and I opened our second practice, we were just two nice guys checking eyes,” said Dr Rice. “We were fully aligned on procedures. As we brought in new doctors across multiple locations, we realized we needed to ascribe diagnostic protocols and treatment plans for common diagnoses. We came together to agree on our best practice pillars, and that involved the types of tests we run on what types of patients and at what frequency. Ensuring every office has [a Carrot headset] helps enable this consistency of care.”
A Commitment to the Highest Level of Patient Care
Dr. Rice acknowledges that being the CEO of a large practice group is a full-time job.”
“You have to have a passion for consistency and patient care,” he says. “You have to be willing to embrace new technology, and you have to keep your patients as your north star.”
It’s an easy promise to make when you’re treating patients like family, with family, and staff who feel like family, by your side.
Image source: https://visionsource.com/
