web analytics

Contact Lens Prescription Provided to Patients

on September 20th, 2007 | Filed under Optoblog

The AOA News reports that the FTC sent letters to a few eye doctors saying they were in trouble for not releasing the contact lens prescription.

This isn’t a problem for me. As soon as the contact lens prescription is finalized, I give them their copy. I even make it good for 2 years since that is what Utah law requires (unless there is a medical reason to make it one).

My problem is that almost every day, I receive a request for another copy of a patient’s CL Rx-and I know for darn well sure that I gave them their copy already. Patients are apparently losing/misplacing their CL Rx, but why do I have to waste time, paper, and toner to fill out another one?

I think I should be allowed to charge money for extra CL Rx copies. The first one is free, but additional ones will cost you. That is in a perfect, fair world. But life isn’t fair. As it stands, I’m not allowed to charge for additional copies. You know that one lady who comes into your dispensary at least once a week to get her glasses adjusted? What if you had some perverse person who enjoyed making you fill out a CL Rx every day or weekly? Do we have a recourse for that?

P.S. Normally you can’t access the AOA News site unless you have a user name and password, which requires membership in the AOA. This is also a big hassle because it should just be able to go publish an RSS feed so I can reed the content in Bloglines or Google Reader. Do they really expect me to open a web-browser, type in the URL, then type in my user name and password everyday just to see if they have updated content?

I think it’s funny that Ciba and VisionWeb pay for advertisements that only a small portion of the optometrists even see. The WSJ is going free because exposure of ads outweighs revenue from paid subscription. The AOANews should do the same. Hey Ciba and VisionWeb, tell the AOANews to go free and publish a site feed!!

By the way, you can circumvent AOANews’ username and password requirement by simply pasting “?AOAMember” at the end of each URL. Again, another reason to go free and offer RSS, AOANews.

Comments Off on Contact Lens Prescription Provided to Patients

Comments are closed.