Discussions with young eyecare professionals are encouraging, inspiring and enlightening. Interestingly, their fresh perspectives don’t simply illustrate newcomers’ views.

The trends they’re addressing and the attitudes they’re articulating are those which are, in a larger sense, in the process of transforming the vision care field and the optical business as we’ve known it.

Things like transparency in their dialogues with patients about everything from eyecare solutions to pricing. Things like collaboration, with their colleagues and other health care professionals via digital/social media and in-person dynamics. Things like readily embracing technology to develop more streamlined, efficient practice and patient care.

Within their comments, as you can read in this month’s VM Millennial Project feature, “Millennials IRL,” there are tips and cues that don’t reflect the wide-eyed innocence of the uninitiated novice. In fact, seasoned veterans might be well-served to adapt some of the ideas of Millennial ECPs when they consider the zippingly-fast competitive landscape out there.

Just behind the younger practicing optometrists and opticians who are forging change in the market—and also learning how to relate to and serve Millennial patients—are just a few of this year’s graduating class of exceptional students of opticianry programs and optometry colleges, highlighted in VM’s “Best in Class” report this year. The incoming generation of ECPs, who will join their Millennial already-practicing colleagues in the field, will be encountering a practice environment unlike any other in history.

New paradigms will be needed as old forms of distribution, traditional notions of reimbursement and evaluation and, especially, new attitudes and expectations among vision care patients and optical consumers, escalate change and help to redefine vision care in the 21st century.

maxelrad@jobson.com