Challenges

I have been emailing, texting, and speaking with people constantly for the past two weeks over the challenges that we are facing as an organization and individual clinics from COVID-19. I have been working closely with John Marvin and the Board of Directors to help formulate strategies to support the clinics in our network. As an aside, you should all know that John Marvin, the regional managers, and the other staff at the TSO corporate office have put together some fantastic work to help everyone. I have been extremely impressed with their foresight and effort.

Chairman’s CORNER
– Reid Robertson, OD

We are putting out emails as quickly as we can with updated information for all of you. So I will not speak of specifics about the COVID-19 outbreak in this article, but want to take a little time to step back from the details and consider the larger picture.

We are currently facing an unprecedented event. In modern history, we have not encountered a pandemic on this scale. This pandemic has had such an amazing ability to affect business and lives around the world. It is a great challenge… exerting pressure on all of us in ways that many of us never anticipated. It is, however, a finite problem. Eventually, this will end. Things will calm down. It may be from all the precautionary measures which people are taking, or from the change in the season or the development of new treatments, but it will end.

Now, we have time to reevaluate the way that we work. Adversity is often the engine of innovation, and there is no doubt that we are facing adversity. The business world is going to be very different after this. Many large companies are forcibly experimenting in which the vast majority of their staff work remotely. They will develop new protocols, evaluate their methods, and find ways to ensure productivity. You can also bet that they will analyze how telecommuting can save them money, and we will see changes in how large companies work.

Each of us should take the time to think about our clinics during this time. Can we develop new ways of running our clinics that are safer, more efficient, and more resilient to challenges like the one that we now face? Many of us have survived natural disasters which stopped patient care and ruined offices. What did we learn from these difficult times? Please communicate with the network. Help us all learn and grow from this instead of allowing it to stop our work. If we focus our efforts, we can innovate and become a more influential network than before this outbreak.