There’s so much room for optometry to grow yet. So how can we take control of that future and become disruptors that will change the industry for the better? Here to talk about that is Dr. Brianna Rhue, CEO and Co-Founder of Dr. Contact Lens, an online platform that makes ordering and purchasing your prescription lenses easy. She joins Harbir Sian to talk about how optometrists and professionals in the industry can better care for their patients by also focusing on the business side of things. Technology is not a bad thing, but we should have a say in incorporating it for the benefit of patients and doctors alike. Listen in to hear more!
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Become The Disruptor With Dr. Brianna Rhue
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Canada’s number one optometry podcast, bringing clarity to optometry, business and entrepreneurship. Thank you again for taking the time to join me. I am always so grateful for all the support, all the comments, the reviews, and all the people I connect with in person who tell me that they tune in to the show. It means so much and warms my heart. It energizes me to come back to create more content and reach out to more amazing guests such as my wonderful guest for this episode, Dr. Brianna Rhue. If you have not heard of Brianna, I am sure you will soon because she is everywhere for good reason.
Brianna is Owner/Partner at West Broward Eye Care. She is the Cofounder of Dr. Contact Lens and TechifEYE. She is the mother of two boys. Her son, Dalton, was the inspiration for you to lean into the whole myopia control side of your business. I would love for you to tell me more about that. Thank you so much for joining me. I am super excited about this conversation. We are going to have an energetic and passionate conversation here. I am excited to have you on.
I am excited to be here, Harbir. It has been a long time coming, especially after meeting you here. You really are tall.
I am tall. I lost count on the first day how many times people say, "You are taller than I thought you were." You cannot tell when I am sitting here but it is all good. It is better than the alternative of people telling me that I am shorter than I look. I will take the taller version for sure. There is a lot for us to talk about. I’ve condensed your bio here. I would love for you to fill in a couple of the gaps. Is there any important information you want to share with the audience before we dig in?
I grew up around optometry. I got my first pair of glasses in second grade. My father had two optometrists that were mentors my entire life. I always loved the optometry side and also the business side. That is where I have been able to merge these two passions between optometry and business, hence why these other businesses have been started. My dad was a furniture builder my whole life. I saw what small business ownership looked like. Some of that got ingrained in my brain from a very young age and that is where we are now. I met my husband when I was doing my rotation at Bascom Palmer. I’m very versatile on all the medical side of things. I then went into private practice and became a partner/owner, and then Dr. Contact Lens and TechifEYE emerged from those.
I mentioned in the intro there, “Bringing clarity to the optometry and business.” Entrepreneurship is the big thing that I like to talk about. I know the audience loves it too because when I go back and look at the stats of the podcast and downloads, it is always those conversations about business and entrepreneurship that seemed to be resonating with people. I love that myself, having dabbled in the entrepreneurial space. I find that it is such an exciting place to be when you are able to start something from scratch and have a guest like yourself, who is not only a partner in a brick and mortar business but also has started this technology company yourself with your partner. I am excited to dig into that. My first question to you is, in your opinion, what is the definition of an entrepreneur?
This is what I live my life by. Being an entrepreneur is you can wake up every day and build your own dreams or you can wake up every day and build your own. Entrepreneurship can take on many different levels. You can be a small business. You can be a technology company that reaches multiple businesses. You can be a consultant. It is what you make of it and it is messy. You can laugh and cry and go through all those emotions in one single day. It is little things of starting with why and what your purpose is.
We all have to understand that in optometry, we are small business owners first. We are all wearing that entrepreneur hat because we did create it. We have created multiple things from scratch. It does not have to be a company that you start. It is your own practice. In our practices, it is not only us being small business owners first that happened to practice optometry. We are optometrists first that happened to be small business owners. That is where the big disconnect is when we are looking at things. We can dive into that deeper.
I did not realize that your answer was going to go that way. It is so important to think of it. I was thinking entrepreneur in the way you initially described it. It’s either helping someone else build their dream or building your own thing. If you own your own business, you are doing that. We are trained that way in school though. We learn all the medical and optometry and then it is like, "Here is a little bit of business on the side for the few of you who want to go into that direction." It is ingrained in us that you are an optometrist first and a business owner second. It has to be the other way around, at least if you want to be successful in that. What do you want our mainstream optometrists to know about leaning into that entrepreneurship role that they should be in?
You can wake up every day and build your own dreams, or you can wake up every day and build your own.
It is continuing to broaden your horizon and learn different things. Just like we learned optometry, the eye, everything that is connected to it, and the importance of yearly eye exams, it is also not hard to learn the business side. We read numerous books and made numerous note cards. I found my notecard book and I am like, "I cannot throw these out because there is so much connected to it." Just like we invested in that part of our education, you have to keep investing in the part that is going to help you pay for that part of your education. Picking up a business book or listening to things like this can take you from 0 to 1, and not get stuck at level 0.5.
We are talking about, “Is it a podcast that you listened to? Is it a book that you read? Is it tracking certain metrics?” It is also about working on your business and not in your business all the time. Those four little walls, as you said in your amazing TED Talk, are not just saying one or two. There is a lot that comes behind that. That also has to extend out so that you can be able to say one or two. If you do not have a business, you do not get to say that. If you do not take care of that side, you are fully not taking care of your patients to the ability that you can be. If you do not have the money to invest in new technology and invest in your staff and invest in your patients. You are doing them a disservice. That is how we have to flip it.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel is a good book. We are going to get into the business type of conversation. When it comes to numbers, I am savvy with the metrics. I love talking about that stuff. I love learning about it but I am still not an expert on it by any means. When I have someone like you on, I am like, “Tell me more.” Tell everybody else what KPIs and whatnots we need to be looking for. I want to talk about you more personally first. One thing I already got from you before we met in person and from seeing you online in all these different forums and platforms was the energy. It is amazing. You are everywhere.
I mean it in a good way. Sometimes people say that to me like, “You are always showing up on my feed.” I am like, “I do not know if that is good or bad. I cannot tell by your tone.” I mean this in the best way. It is incredible knowing that you are a business owner, entrepreneur and mother. How do you find the energy? Where does the energy come from? Where is the inspiration? What is getting you out there to do all these things? We were on a webinar together and your talk was incredible. I love the enthusiasm you put into it.
A lot of people come on and be like, "Now we are going to talk about this thing," but you are like, "Look at me. I am doing this. I am the queen of my castle." I loved it. I want you to know that I love your energy. Tell me, if you do not mind, where do you think that comes from and where can people tap into that for themselves too?
I have many nicknames surrounding my energy, from Energizer Bunny to Pop-Tart because I would pop tart out of bed in the mornings. I have always been a cheerleader. It is my nature of being a dancer, gymnast and cheerleader. I am everybody else’s cheerleader too because it is what I love to do. I could be doing backflips and standing on my head for the rest of my life, and that would be my super happy place. I get energy from feeding off a good circle of people. It is important to find your core group on what keeps you motivated. I have always been coachable and I love people coaching me, and me trying to help other people through stories and content like this to help us to get that dream.
Not only to the "be happy" part. Happy is used in the wrong term in a lot of ways. It’s like, “I will be happy if I get this. I will be happy when I do this.” “Happy is always moving,” I heard that and I cannot remember who said it but it is replacing the word happy with joy. These things bring me joy. My practice and my patients are different parts of it. The business side is what accelerates all of this and sharing that with people that had been my mentors forever.
Become The Disruptor: Continue to broaden your horizon and learn different things.
I feel like I am expanding on the universe and what is in front of us to be our own bosses, be in charge of the industry, and drive the industry forward where it has been status quo for a time. Become that disruptor because I feel like we are all being disrupted. We go to so many years of school, and give up our entire 20s and our 30s to become doctors. What is driving me here is I am sick of the doctor-patient relationship being cut out of the equation. If we keep doing that, everybody loses, from industry to patients to us. We have to be advocates for the future. There are not enough of us standing up for that. That is what gets me up every day.
I knew this already but the things that we align on in that mindset of advocating for the profession, "Let's get up and move this thing forward," is something that I can get real fired up about every day any time of day. Let's get into that. I have heard you say this before. The first time you said it to me, it felt like a light bulb went on. It made so much sense. We are so used to being disrupted and being the disrupters. How do we become the disruptors? How do we leverage and take advantage of the disruption ourselves? Why cannot we be doing that from the inside versus what some external forces do? I would love to hear your thoughts more on that, and then share with us what you are doing to be one of the disruptors from within.
That came about with Dr. Contact Lens. Jenn Tabiza and I went to school together. We both bought private practices close to one another. She is in LA and I am in Fort Lauderdale, but we closed the deal together. We had conversations time and time again about what was happening. We all have that reaction when a patient sits down in your exam chair and says, "This is the best eye exam that I have ever had. Your staff is amazing and all the equipment that you have. Can I have a copy of my prescription?" That hurts all of us because we have not gotten a raise from one of these vision plans in a very long time.
I know in Canada, you operate differently. In the US, it has been that same amount for a long time. How we take care of our businesses and how I am able to invest in my patients is by selling what I prescribe. That comes to glasses and contact lenses because we know it is medical devices at the end of the day. That is how we take care of our patients and figure out if they are diabetic or have glaucoma and get them back in for their yearly exams. It is tying part of the refraction to the medical diagnosis and what it should be. Dr. Contact Lens was born out of that feeling of always playing defense, "Please order for me. I have your rebate. I have your vision plan." It is not a good place for you to be as a doctor and it is not a good place for your staff to live.
We wanted something that was like, “Perfect, I have uploaded your benefits. Your rebate is loaded and you can download and print your prescription so you have access to your record 24/7 or you can order here in one click.” That is why this was created. It is playing in giving the patient that little bit of control that they are asking for. I am not a huge advocate for saying, “If a patient asks you for a PD, that patient is way out of your door already." There is nothing that you are going to say that is going to recapture that sale and make you feel good at the end of the day. You got to meet them where they want to be met. If you do that and you make it convenient, then everybody wins. We just have to give them the opportunity.
There are differences as far as the vision plans that do not apply in Canada, but there are other analogous things going on. If you replace the word “vision plan” with whatever our government healthcare pays, there are some analogies there in a way. Where I live in British Columbia, there was huge deregulation a while back. We are required by law. I know certain things like this are starting to happen in the US. There are whispers of the FTC regulations changing, but this has been the case for us. By law, we have to provide the prescription with the PD written on it. It is not a matter of the patient asking us anymore.
It has to be given. If you do not give it, the patient can take some recourse but usually, it is nothing like that. We have had to try to adjust that. I have been in that and everybody else has been in that awkward position of almost begging the patient to stay, "Please look at some glasses here. We will match the price on the contact lenses." I have been there. That needs to change. How long is that going last? How long are we going to want to grovel for our patients to purchase from us? Why not accept that this is where it is at?
We have to be advocates for the future
Meet the patient where they want to be met. This is a lot of what we were talking about. You and I did this eCommerce type of webinar. A lot of the stuff we were touching on is like, “This is where people are living. Why don’t we just go to where people are living and meet them there, rather than trying to force them to meet us where we are?” A lot of our colleagues are struggling with this mentality of this switch. What is the roadblock there? What is stopping them from taking that step?
You uncovered something here. There are a couple of things that play here. One is that everybody can say that they have ordered something online that has been delivered to their door. What makes this box of contact lenses or potentially a box of glasses different from that box that somebody ordered? When we walk into our practices and open that door, for some reason, we forget that we were a consumer before we hit that door. It is calling them now, which everybody else is calling our patients healthcare consumers. They are there. They are allowed to have access to their care. I am having a new infant. Some of my purchasing is happening at 2:00 in the morning. For most Amazon purchasers, you can tell if somebody is a new mommy because stuff arrives at 2:00 AM.
There was something done in the ‘80s and ‘90s that was saying, “You want your patients to come back and pick up this box of whatever it is because you are going to show them and sell them another thing.” Looking at that and saying, “No, they are not. They are trying to get to daycare at 5:00 PM because now they are being charged $20 for every minute that they are late or they got to get home and get dinner on the table." We are all busier than ever trying to get home. I do not have time to go back to my optometrist and pick up my boxes of contacts.
Your staff is not showing them that frame that came in because they are going through the same thing. You have got to get this direct ship-to-patient model going. I am over 95% direct ship-to-patient in my office. We do that by providing free shipping on anything. You can play with this and there are ways there to make money off of that, but it is meeting the patient where they are. The number one reason that something is abandoned online is that there is no free shipping attached to it because that ship sailed 5 or 6 years ago.
Definitely, during COVID, free shipping is an expectation now. That is the standard. It is no longer like, "Cool, they threw in free shipping," You have to have that minimum. It is such an interesting point that you make. I have done these lectures. I have given these lectures on behalf of a contact lens company, introducing a product or talking about the increase in touchpoints. When a patient comes in to buy their contact lens or comes to pick up their contact lens, there is the increased touchpoints, therefore more opportunities for sales.
In theory, that makes sense. Maybe it did up until a few years ago. After COVID, that does not. Let’s think about what the average person is trying to do. They are trying to get from point A to point B to point C to home. Unless they have a real appointment set where they are going to come in and spend time in the office, they are coming to grab the contacts and then, “I will see you later.” Meeting them where they are and having them deliver it to the house and using that. When you have a box of contacts shipped to a patient, is that an opportunity to provide messaging to the patient within that box? Are there other contents being delivered that remind the patient, "Do not forget us at West Broward Eye Care or Clarity Eye Care."
It is not about touchpoints anymore. It is about creating raving fans and raving patients. If you can meet the patient and send them a link where they can download and print or order their contact lenses in one click, you are going to go from a customer service experience from a 5 to a 10 because you met them. You had free shipping. They got their boxes and they do not have to go back. Not only is it a different type of touchpoint, but you are also elevating that patient experience versus them coming in at 5:00 PM, and Susie behind the front desk has four other people to check in or check out. They have to wait ten minutes to get their box.
Become The Disruptor: Just like we invested in that part of our education, we have to keep investing in the part that will help pay for that education.
Think of that customer experience that you want to create and set, and how you can look high-tech for these offices. Especially since it is being jammed down our throats with telemedicine and like, “Order your contacts here and order your glasses here.” We already have the brick and mortar. We already did that. We did the hard part of this. Now we get to do the easy part, which is the eCommerce side. It is not about touchpoints anymore. It is about meaningful touchpoints.
You know this more than I do, but there is so much resistance that we meet when we talk about eCommerce, getting online, and digital marketing. Is it a fear of the unknown? You could everybody some numbers like the value in switching to a platform like this whether it is Dr. Contact Lens or something else. The numbers speak for themselves. The dollars and cents are there, but there is some other mental block. Is it too much on the training side or educating the staff side? Is it like, “I do not think it is going to work.”? Is it too much of an upfront financial investment? From your experience, what has the pushback been for the most part?
It has been interesting being an optometrist and then coming to the sales side, and trying to get us out of our own way for making money. We have been taught to save money for some reason. That is not where the opportunity lies. It is looking at true ROI. We are good at doing it with machines. I buy a digital camera. I know that I am going to charge XYZ for it and make this much and pay it off in this amount. That is a hardcore value that we can measure. When it comes to the online world, it is all trackable if you look at it. All of us have built things in our platforms to do this. It is understanding that even if you are doing good with your annual supply rate and your capture rate, there is still so much leaking out of your practice.
For instance, if you have 1,000 contact lens patients in your practice, which is normal for a 1 to 2 doctor practice, and your capture rate is 80%. That means 800 patients ordered something from you and 200 walked out of the door. If you captured 5% of those walking, it more than pays for the cost of a service. If you take that a step further from the 800 that ordered something if your annual supply rate is 50% and mine is 40%, and I built a system. That means 400 patients need to reorder from you. If 200 walked and 400 need a reminder from me, that means 60% or 600 patients walked out of the door that I was never able to try to do business with again. I hope that they call me in six months to order from me, which they will not because it is at 9:30 at night when they throw out the last contact lens that they want to order.
It is understanding that the $200,000 is low hanging right there. Invest a little bit in a process and going from paper to EMR, we all did it. To come back to your question, it is a lot of staff and changing a process if you stick with something for a year. I hate the word “try.” We tried it and it did not work. Implementation for some of these processes can take a while, but we are there to hold your hand. If your staff is excited about it and we are not meeting a dead wall, we are here to be an open book. If you go in cross-armed, you are going to get out what you put in.
We sold an account. The doctor was super excited about it. She came back the day before we were going to implement it. We had already pulled in all of her information. We showed her where $257,000 was hiding. She was like, "We are not going to move anymore because my staff voted." "Here is your money back, but I want to show you what you are leaving here.” I am not there at this point to sell her to stay. That is not what I was there to do. It’s to educate her and say, “I get it. You are up against the staff here but at the end of the day, you are a business owner. They cost you potentially $257,000. I am not sure if you wanted your staff to vote in that case.”
It does not sound like a staff voting type of situation to me. That is insane when you have those numbers in front of you. I am guilty of this too. If I am not showing those numbers, I am out of sight, out of mind. I will assume everything is working. Once you show me, "How do you like them?" I will be like, "Let's do it. Let's go." When it comes down to those kinds of numbers, that is not a vote that the staff gets. It is like, "Here is the plan moving forward." It is crazy.
You have to meet the patients where they want to be met. If you do that, and you make it convenient, everybody wins.
On the implementation side of it, anything takes time to implement. We are trained medically so when you bring in a retinal camera or you bring in an OCT, you already know how you are going to implement it. It is going to fit into your patient flow like this. When you start talking about technologies like, "Who is going to be running it? Who is going to be implementing it?" That is extra work for me to monitor now. A few of those people and patients captured automatically pay for this thing, and then it is off to the races from there. What are we going to do? We have to get out there and yell from the mountain top. We got to get on to more podcasts and do more webinars. We got to get in front of more people and say, "Come."
“It’s fun on this side of the fence.” I do not like living in doom and gloom like we’ve been taught. You do not have to live there. Our most valuable patients, because I know this side of the industry so well, are really our contact lens patients. We are all trying to drop vision plans or get into my opiate management or scleral contact lenses or dry iris prosthetic, where you find that clinic and the clinic of your dreams not to just be busy but to be busy with the right patients is your contact lens patients.
That minus three mom, 34 or 35-year-old that has been wearing contacts is your dry eye patient that walked out of the door that potentially went online to not renew from you. That is her kids that are potentially myopic that you are trying to build in myopia practice. It is also being laser-focused. You can only focus on so many things. I get it. The medical side is easy for us to focus on because that is what we know. That is what I can control in my practice.
It is funny about this slide that everybody has referenced me as the Queen of my Castle thing. I got this from Susan Resnick. She is like, "As much as I say that I am the queen of my castle, some the days, I am not. I depend on other people to help me and pick me up." That comes to your office manager and it comes to having that cheerleader in your office. They do not care, at the end of the day, if you make more money. They do care about taking care of the patient like you do. If we word some of this differently with our staff, then we are keeping a clinic healthy and that is what we are there to do.
We use this analogy in so many other cases. It’s the oxygen mask on an airplane thing. You are going to put yours on before you can put it on for the person next to you. The business owner’s business has got to be breathing and successful, then you are able to help your staff and help your patients. You have to have the energy to do all of that. Sometimes we look at it the other way around as if the patient has to provide you with the mask when it should be the other way around. We will go back to the whole cheerleading thing before we wrap up.
Let’s talk more about some of these metrics within the office. One thing you touched on is that the contact lens patient is most likely your most valuable patient. A lot of times, ECPs worry that if a patient buys an annual supply, then they are not going to have as much money to spend on something else. There are surveys or studies that have been done that show this. My personal experience shows me as well that those patients will still spend the money in all those other places. We have the 40-something who buys the multifocal contact lenses, but then wants to get the dry eye treatment.
We have the radio frequency and the IPL and they are willing to invest in that, and then they still want to buy the nice frames because they know that they got to wear the glasses. They are not going to wear contacts all the time. Usually, it is patients in that age group. The 40s and 50s have more disposable income as well. It is not like where we are closing our other opportunities by selling these contact lenses. We should be looking at it as opening a door to all these other revenue streams within our practice as well. Is that something that you would experience as well on your site?
Become The Disruptor: If you don’t have the money to invest in new technology and your staff and your patients, you’re doing them a disservice.
A hundred percent. Those are the patients that come back more often that do have more disposable income that is open to what we prescribe. There are a couple of bad words in my practice. One is calling a vision plan insurance and asking, “How many boxes do you want?” Box is a bad word. The word “follow-up” is a bad word in my practice like, "We will see you back for an eye problem evaluation or a dry eye evaluation," because follow-up condones free. I am not about to give my service away for free. You start to get on that path and not recommend but prescribe. It’s not, “I am recommending this contact lens for you?” It’s, “I am prescribing this contact lens for you.”
If you can start to change one little word, it makes a difference to the patient. They came to you because you are an expert and they want to hear from you first on new treatments. They do not want to see an ad on TV and then come in and ask for it. That is what I have always been an advocate for. We are always learning. We are physicians. We are supposed to always be learning. Just like we learned this side, we can learn metrics, business, ROI and little business words. The big word now, I do not know about this in Canada, that nobody knew about years ago was EBITDA. Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization.
If you are looking to increase that, you can do something as little as investing in a process because that is what these people are coming in to do. They are putting processes in place that are broken, just like the contact lens ordering process is broken. It is a 28-step process from start to finish for a box when it is shipped back to your office. We cannot be having our staff do these mundane tasks anymore to save $5. It is also about patient information. We are all giving our most valuable intellectual property away for a 2% rebate. What do I mean by that? You are going to give whoever it is a 2% savings.
If you order 100 boxes of contact lenses and you save $2 a box by doing the 2% rebate, you save yourself $200. What you could have done was get a contact lens patient back that is valuable to your practice at $350 or $500 or $700 depending on where you are located. I lost money by trying to save money and not giving your intellectual property away for a 2% rebate. TechifEYE was born to show us these things because this is what we have been up against as a tech startup and helps doctors evaluate certain things.
That intellectual property thing is something that went over my head. I did not realize it. I even asked you like, "Who is taking my data?" I want you to share that if you do not mind. For the different companies and manufacturers that we are using, I said, "I do not give them any of my information," but there is still information being shared regarding our patients. What is the value of us holding that data versus giving it to a big corporation? Can you explain that a little bit more?
When you are giving someone access to your records or if you are putting something in as far as a rebate is concerned, they are capturing the patient’s first name, last name, what they ordered, and their zip code where they can look a lot of stuff up. They are putting in their email address for marketing. Are they using it in this form? Maybe not right now but who knows where that could be driven in the future? This is a statistic that is outdated. I found something that was saying that one patient is worth about $1,500. That is way underestimated, especially if you are looking at the LTV or lifetime value of a patient.
If you are seeing a patient that spends on average $500 a year in your clinic, they come back every two years, and you see them for the next 30 years, you can figure that out quickly. These companies all have that. That is fine. That is not what I am saying. Do not stop doing that but I want you to empower yourself with the data. I want you to understand and use the data that they are, and the way that they are using it because it is fun over here. It allows you to spot check things. For instance, I was in my clinic. I spot checked a patient within Dr. Contact Lens. I realized there was something that was not billed. It was $70 that got missed and was not billed properly. Let’s round this up to $100 because I could easily go into my practice and find $100 a day that was not billed properly. We can all do this.
There’s a place for telemedicine, but there’s still something to human connection. That’s what we’re all about.
At $500 a day for 5 days a week, that’s $2,500 a week. If we push that out, what does that equal here? That is $130,000 that I found in one click. It is not about being happy with the wage that you are making and we cannot blame that on anybody else. It is finding little tweaks that make a huge difference on that backend.
Those are all the things that technology now allows us to do. The reasons why you, in particular, are out there sharing this message and almost being evangelical about it, “Everybody come on board. There is so much here for us.” It can be that simple. It might sound like an exaggeration for somebody who has not looked into this type of stuff but this technology is there for us. I love that I have an optometrist. I have started a series of these. I had another interview with an optometrist in the UK. He is an entrepreneur and started his own company. He is doing well and doing big things. Now I have you. I feel like I am going to start a whole series on entrepreneurship and eye care.
It is inspiring and hopefully, it inspires others to step up. Let's be the disruptors from within. It does not have to be that something is always knocking us sideways from the outside. Let's be the ones that grow the profession and take control of that. On that note, I want to get your thoughts on where do you think eye care is going? Do you think there is going to be more of these disruptors from within? Do you think we are going to continue to get disrupted from the outside? If you can look at this both ways, what is your blue sky, best case scenario 10 to 20 years down the road? What do you hope to see? If things do not go so well, where could we potentially end up?
What I hope for the future is I think there is a place there for telemedicine and do not get me wrong, but there is still something to human connection. That is what we are all about. That is about listening and being compassionate. That is why we became doctors. In order to get to do that, we have to be the driver of that and show what is wrong. This brings me to our EMR companies, our Electronic Medical Record companies. They have been the ones inhibiting innovation. I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with these people where they are like, “We are not going to integrate with you.” I was like, “You made a decision for 10,000 of your users that did not know that you said that.”
We have to be the ones that are seeing the future and coming at it and pushing these EMR companies forward to open up access because it is not their data. It is our data that we should be able to get to use. Fast forward when I am 70, I do not want a computer taking care of me. I want the computer to help take care of me. I do want someone with that knowledge and that compassion to look at me from head to toe. How many tumors have we all diagnosed? How many diabetics have we all diagnosed? How many connections are you making within a community? All of that is the driver to being here on this earth.
If I look at it from the other side, technology is going to help us be better and catch things sooner because healthcare is not circular. You are going to this doctor and they have records here or this doctor and they have records here. It is not all together under one umbrella. That is going to be here sooner than we think, which will be great. It is a whole cohesive person and being integrated into that care versus being stuck in a dark room all day. We have to be the ones that are saying, we need this to better take care of our patients so we can be on the offense. It is all integrated.
Is the future of our profession looking bright or dim?
Become The Disruptor: It’s not just about touchpoints. It’s about meaningful touchpoints.
I think it is very bright because a lot of us are starting to wake up and take action. We need that to happen sooner than later. It is getting to conferences, coming out, talking and having these connections and these conversations that we have been able to now have. I can reach you from here to Canada to the UK to South Africa. We are all connected now and that is cooler than ever. In the past, we never would have had platforms like this.
We are starting to understand the business side and share it. That is where we get to have fun to invest in the medical side of our practices to better take care of the patient. A patient, when they say, "Doctor, you have all of the craziest and coolest equipment I have ever seen." I say, "You invested in me, so I was able to invest in you." That is how I thank the patient. It hits home with them saying, "I did help her buy that to take care of me." It is a roundabout way. I am all about planting little seeds. For some reason, they all like to sprout at the same time. It is the little words that we use and chooses to use that can make a huge difference.
We hear that in our office as well. I am sure many of our colleagues do. Those of us who are trying to stay up with technology, and we do get that. Patients will say, "I have never had that. You invested in this. I like that.” It is because the patients have invested in us. That is very good. There are two questions for every guest on the show before we wrap up. Before we get to those, please share how people can find you. Where would you like people to go?
They can find me on LinkedIn, Brianna Rhue. They can visit DrContactLens.com. You can reach me there. My email is BRhue@doctorcontactlens.com, and then like, share, post and comment. We are all part of this. We are all learning from each other. That is all part of the engagement.
The last two questions. You were at the Vision Summit in New York, right?
I was.
That is funny because one of the ladies that was speaking who was an entrepreneur said, “I do not like when people ask me what advice would I give to my younger self?” That is the first question I usually ask my guests here. I will say, "If you could go back in time to a point in your life where things were a little bit difficult, what advice would you give yourself?" After she said that, I was like, "Maybe I will not ask that anymore." The questions she thinks that is more relevant and that I started asking now because it is a cool question. It makes people think quite a bit. What would your 10 or 15-year-old self say to Dr. Brianna Rhue now?
It’s little words that we use and choose to use that can make a huge difference.
I have never given up. You all get knocked down. Having been bullied in middle school and I could have chosen to live there or I had a huge support system to get me where I am. Be careful with who your top 5 or 10 people are that are in your life. I was able to be steered in a way that was very positive. I always never heard the word “no.” I always hear, “Not right now.”
You talked about that right off the top too when I was asking about your energy. You said it comes from those key people that you spend time with. I found that in my own life that is so important. The older you get, the more you realize it because your circle gets a bit smaller. You filter out. You do not have as much time for so many people, so you end up filtering down to the key people. That is the answer that I give to so many people when somebody asks me, “How do you have time to do all these things?” I do not necessarily think that I am doing more than anybody else but somebody asked me that question. I am only able to do the things that I am doing, whether they are more or less than what other people are doing because of the people around me. My wife, for number one, is able to support me in all the different ways that she does. My parents and my family and my close friends give me brutal and honest feedback when I am not doing something well.
That stuff means something and it is extremely valuable. I wanted to say that earlier but since you brought it up again, I will 100% agree with you on the importance of that circle of friends. That is so key. The last question is in everything that you have accomplished so far in your life, in your business life, professional life and personal life, how much of that would you say is due to luck and how much is due to hard work?
There is a bit of luck. Right place, right time and seeing the vision. A lot of it is hard work and energy and getting knocked down but getting up again. One of the stories in the Dr. Contact Lens venture as we were at that point was somebody knocked us down real hard and we had two paths to take. One was to give up or one was to figure it out and move forward. I am glad that we chose to move forward with it.
Hard work or luck or both? How much of each?
I am a true believer in you have to find signs in the universe that you know that you are on the right path. A lot of the time, you can get into a dark place, especially as an entrepreneur. It is hard work but the right work. I am a huge believer in the book, Traction. It is being that visionary and finding integrators in your life where you can live where you want to be living to keep creating and focus on the work that you want to do.
People ask me all the time, “How do you do all of this? You must not sleep.” I am like, “I sleep pretty good.” It is being focused. In the book, Deep Work, it is not having a hive mindset. It is being laser-focused and coming up with that five-year plan, your one-year plan, your 90 days, and then breaking it back out into weeks. That comes down to daily habits and daily goals that you set for yourself. It is hard work but a little bit of luck.
Become The Disruptor: We have to be the ones saying, “we need this to better take care of our patients,” so we can be on the offense.
They are both necessary. It would be nice to sit in a room and wait for luck to happen but you got to get out there and do it. You are doing it. Thank you for doing everything that you are doing, especially being this voice and this advocate for growing the profession to take it to different levels and different heights, and encouraging our colleagues to be the disruptors from within. We need that. That voice is rising up and it is nice to have you at the core of it. Please keep doing it. If there is any time you need somebody else to shout loudly with you, I am happy to join you whenever you need.
One last note there, optometry is super bright. You can have a career, a husband, a baby, another baby, and build businesses. There is more to optometry than just the exam chair. That is what makes you your money but if you tweaked little things, you can build the life of your dreams. It is important to find people that are doing it like yourself and others in the industry and collaborate.
Anybody out there who wants to get out there more or feels like some of the messages that I am sharing or resharing sharing are resonating with you, get in touch. Dr. Brianna has got her contact information here. You know how to reach me on Instagram at @HarbirSian.OD. Thank you again, Dr. Brianna Rhue, for joining me on the show. I appreciate all your insight. I am excited to watch you continue doing your thing out in the world.
Thanks, Harbir. It was my pleasure.
Thank you everybody who is tuned in to Canada’s number one optometry show. I am super excited to bring you more and more amazing content. I will see you in the next episode.
Important Links
Brianna Rhue - LinkedIn
@HarbirSian.OD - Instagram
About Dr. Brianna Rhue
Brianna Rhue earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona before earning her Doctorate of Optometry at Nova Southeastern University. She completed her residency at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami and is a partner at West Broward Eyecare in South Florida.
Dr. Rhue is passionate about health care technology, myopia management, specialty contact lens fits and practice management. She enjoys sharing her love for technology and myopia management through speaking engagements to help optometrists understand business, technology and new areas of care to help all parties involved.
Dr. Rhue is the immediate past president of the Broward County Optometric Association. She is the co-founder of Dr. Contact Lens, TechifEYE and Myopia Patrol. Outside the office, she enjoys spending time with her husband and two sons, playing tennis, standing on her head in yoga and traveling.