laser treatment rooms — and effectively doubled our operating volume.
Looking back, deciding to build new was a bit of a gamble. To
attract enough surgeons to justify the investment, we knew we'd have
to carefully plan every detail. If we build it, we said, the surgeons will
likely come. But if we equipped it poorly, we knew they wouldn't stay.
Has it worked? We're way ahead of projected case volumes and now
expect to do 11,000 cataract operations this year and around 20,000
total procedures. You could say it's the apple of my eye. It was a leap
of faith to build our state-of-the-art facility, but we were confident in
the reputation we'd established in the region, we knew our staff was
excellent and we knew our focus on technology was where it needed
to be. It was a lot of work, but also a labor of love.
Rooms for growth
Although we've always done nothing but ophthalmology, we decided
to hedge our bets in case somewhere down the line we couldn't fill all
our ORs with eye cases. So, we designed our operating rooms to be
more than 400 square feet each — considerably larger than the tradi-
tional ophthalmologic OR. That way, if at some point we decided to
partner with a hospital or health system (which I don't anticipate
doing), our ORs would be able to accommodate virtually any specialty.
Of course, we had to think about how we'd light those big ORs,
since lighting had to be incorporated into the construction plans. We
wanted state-of-the-art LED lighting, so, several months before we
moved out of our previous facility, we trialed offerings from various
manufacturers and got feedback from the surgeons. That gave me
time to negotiate before we had to choose.
Like most eye facilities, we primarily do cataract and other types of
anterior and posterior segment surgeries, so the key consideration
for 4 of our ORs was to adequately illuminate the Mayo stand when
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