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Among the lessons learned by the executive team at MyEyeDr. over the past two decades is the importance of investing in areas that directly address the company’s overall mission “to help patients live their best lives.” This often has resulted in the decision to accelerate investment in integrated technologies that “transform and modernize the patient experience to where it needs to be,” executives have noted.





Chief executive officer Sue Downes noted at a recent Vision Monday Executive Summit session that she believes the eyecare sector has “lagged” other business areas in the move to adopt the latest technologies and ideas, even as many new and great technologies are being developed. “Nothing is working together,” she noted at VM’s October 2020 virtual VM Leadership Summit, in a session titled “Stepping Up the Patient Experience.”

Addressing the eyecare sector’s outlook and attitude toward innovations such as online refraction, she said, “We’ve moved from thinking that it will never happen in our lifetime; to being scared, to accepting. And now we’re ready to embrace,” noting that the industry is still challenged with “how it all integrates together” to truly serve up a more personalized, engaged experience for each patient and their preferences for care.

Noting the evolution of care and the patient experience, MyEyeDr.—like the Trailblazer path it has set out to follow in other areas—is readily adopting what it calls “video assisted eye exams.”

In a recent interview with Vision Monday, Artis Beatty, OD, MyEyeDr.’s chief medical officer, noted that a number of the group’s offices are offering the video-assisted eye health exams.

“I use that term because [the term] telehealth really does imply that you’ve got a patient who’s remote and a caregiver who’s also remote,” he explained. He said the MyEyeDr. preferred approach is to work with patients who are physically in a MyEyeDr. location, with the doctor conducting the comprehensive eye health examination from a remote location using a video-assisted platform, which enables the patient and doctor to have a “synchronous visit.”

“The doctor is even able to control the instrumentation and the office setting,” he said. “They are able to do the refraction remotely and one of the technicians is with the patient from beginning to end. The doctor appears on the screen, allowing the patient and the doctor to have communication and to complete the exam that way.”

Beatty noted that “the big step” in this direction for MyEyeDr. came in 2020 when it first began piloting the video-assisted eye health exam procedure. “We grew that program considerably by the end of 2021, and we’re going to continue to invest in that and grow it in 2022. It allows us to be able to bring eyecare to patients in locations where it may be difficult to hire a doctor or there may be more demand than a doctor by themselves can satisfy,” he added. The video-assisted eye health exam may enable the doctor to meet the patient demand that otherwise would have gone without eyecare.

“This [model] can allow for more routine type of visits to be accomplished side by side with a doctor who’s also doing a lot more medically directed care. And so it just opens up the ability to see a variety of patients in clinics without necessarily having to limit the doctor on site based on who’s walking in the door.”

MyEyeDr. also is involved in remote eyecare in more of the traditional way that remote exams are thought of, and this is accomplished via the group’s EHR platform, Beatty said. This remote model is called upon when a patient has questions about an eye issue and the patient is either still at home or in another remote location and can’t get to the MyEyeDr. office. The doctor providing the care to the patient can either be in the office or in another remote location.

“Yes, we can do this via our EHR platform,” he said. “So we’re able to address video-assisted eye exams in these two ways.”