The Altman Eye Center team attends The Gateway Tour in Kentucky.
Sponsored Content
By Mike Rothschild, OD, and Amanda Lee, OD
Nov. 17, 2025
We believe the future of eye care depends on preparing doctors and their entire teams—not just clinicians—to use technology thoughtfully and practically. That’s why we’ve invested in the Gateway Tour: to give practices a hands-on, team-focused way to understand what’s possible, separate hype from usable tools and actually implement changes that improve capacity, access and patient outcomes.
One of the most important lessons of the Gateway Tour is that staff teams are the multipliers for technology adoption. When staff members aren’t on the same page as the doctor, initiatives stall. Those practices that fully engage the team tend to see quicker adoption and more meaningful change. We always stress that buying technology is one thing; implementing and embedding it into daily routines is another. That’s where Vision Source dedicates resources: showing teams how to implement, not just what’s new.
Supply Crisis Coming
Several demographic and workforce trends are converging to create a bottleneck in eye care. The number of ophthalmologists remains nearly flat, while Baby Boomers represent 21% of the population and a huge demand for eye care services. So it becomes critical that optometrists step in to fill the gaps.
If optometry is going to meet that demand and serve as a true primary care touchpoint, we need to build efficiencies—and that means bringing technology into the clinic in ways that save time without sacrificing face time with patients.
We hear again and again that doctors want to do right by their patients, but they’re already busy. In addition, some staff members feel intimidated by the greater responsibility or potential strain on their time.
AI Augments; It Doesn’t Replace
One persistent anxiety we hear is that AI will take jobs. We push back on that directly. AI should augment your care team and take the repetitive tasks off your plate—scheduling follow-ups, drafting patient education or prepopulating certain notes—so clinicians can spend their precious face-to-face minutes where they add the most value. The goal is not to replace the exam but to enable practices to see more patients and catch disease earlier by freeing clinicians from rote work.
The team from Reedley Optometric Eyecare Center and Vision Source leaders at The Gateway Tour in California.
That said, the market is noisy. We see lots of tools that look promising but aren’t ready for prime time. At this point, they may slow workflows or the products can’t “talk” to your EHR or billing systems. The result can feel like a higher-tech Frankenstein: more devices and platforms that increase data entry rather than reduce it. Fixing that requires better interoperability, better integration with coding and billing workflows and tools designed around how clinics actually work.
Yet the technology is advancing far more rapidly than many of us imagined. To prepare for what’s coming, the Gateway Tour is working with practices to level-set. Let’s start with those tasks where AI can save time on the repetitive tasks. We’ve seen practices translate forms and patient communications
quickly, run parts of an exam in another language more smoothly and begin using AI to prepopulate administrative tasks. Those early efficiencies are the path to being able to schedule and care for the growing population of older patients without burning out staff.
Stepping Into a Broader Role
Optometry is central to early detection, long-term care and total wellness. With the current med-tech in our practices, we are in a unique position to sit at the gateway of health care for our patients. With better tech and workflows, we can capture additional disease states earlier and make timely referrals that improve outcomes. Our focus at Vision Source is to help members prove those outcomes and close the loop between detection and treatment. If we don’t prepare to meet that need, other parts of the health care system will fill the gap, and that would be a missed opportunity for our field.
Technology is not the solution by itself; it’s the instrument that lets us do more of what we already do well. Our emphasis at Vision Source is pragmatic: reduce repetitive work, protect clinician–patient time and implement tools that truly integrate into your clinic. As AI-supported technology advances, we want our members to lead, not follow in making technology work for their patients, their staff and their practice.
Learn more and register here.
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Mike Rothschild, OD, is Head of Consulting, Vision Source. |
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Amanda Lee, OD, is Vice President, Innovation & Technology, Vision Source. |
