By Rajeev K. Raghu, OD, 
FAAO
Offering personalized lenses is a premium option that can set you apart from competing practices and online optical retailers. Succeeding with this high-performance, high-ticket vision solution requires educating the patient—again and again.
With competitors online and offline providing fast, inexpensive eyewear, we made the decision many other ODs are beginning to make to offer our patients personalized ophthalmic lenses. Personalized lenses are a practice-builder. Patients are happier with the superior quality of personalized lenses than they are with conventional lenses, leading to greater loyalty to your practice and greater profit. In addition to the greater profit-per-patient available with personalized lenses, these higher-quality lenses also reduce the need for remakes. We have always had a high success rate with 90 percent of patients happy with their eyeglasses lenses the first time around with no need for remakes, but this metric has improved even more with personalized lenses. We have a 95 percent success rate (5 percent non-adapt) with Visioffice. There is no loss with any progressive non-adapt as our Essilor Lab will give us a bifocal or another progressive at no charge.
To realize the financial advantages of this opportunity, you first must educate patients about the benefits of personalized lenses.
Make 50 Percent More Net Profit Per Patient
Personalized lenses lead to greater per-patient-spend as they can be sold for nearly twice as much as conventional lenses. How much more profitable to the practice are personalized lenses versus traditional eyeglasses? Compared to traditional PAL’s we make 50 percent more per patient, meaning patients pay almost twice as much for these lenses as for traditional lenses. We make $200 for a traditional PAL and $350 for a personal PAL.
Educate Patient to Avoid Sticker Shock
Personalized lenses cost patients more–substantially more, with fully-loaded (premium glare-free, polycarbonate material) sold for $725 to $775 for just the lenses–without also adding in the cost of frames. We educate patients about the benefits, with the free-standing Visioffice instrument providing a lot of WOW as well. The education begins when patients first come in for their appointment. After they register with the front desk, one of our opticians invites them to browse our optical and at the same time lets them know about the availability of personalized lenses. I take the educational process from there in the exam room by letting patients know about the opportunity to purchase personalized lenses and–most importantly–that I am prescribing these lenses for them. I then hand-off to our optical team to point out all the measurements taken by the Visoffice technology and how these ultra-precise measurements enable vision that is as much as two times as sharp as that offered by traditional PALs.
The bottom line: We try not to “sell,” but educate patients, and if they do choose a less expensive, non-personalized lens, that is OK too. We never want a patient to go elsewhere to get better eyecare.
Profitable on First Day–With Right Marketing
Personalized lenses were profitable for us the first day we offered them! We promoted the Visioffice Eyecode lenses–Visioffice’s signature lenses– via e-mail to our patient base and had five patients on the first day we began selling them. We always want to offer patients better vision through technology, and Essilor has always provided our patients with great progressives, so we saw the introduction of personalized lenses by an Essilor system as a way to give our patients more of what they already were pleased with. Our marketing of personalized lenses was broad-based–to our entire patient list–but another idea is to target patients with a proven record of spending more than your average patient on eyewear, such as patients in progressive lenses.
We generated our own personalized e-mail blasts and web site promotions, rather than waiting for Essilor to send us material. But we expect to have new Essilor-furnished marketing brochures and media pieces in the future, which we will add to the material we designed ourselves.
Three Steps to Personalized Lens Patient Education
Introduce the concept. Introduce the technology to patients before their examination: When they are browsing the optical before their examination.
Prescribe from the exam room. As doctor, explain what personalized lenses are and why they would be more beneficial to the patient than conventional PALs.
Re-educate in the optical. Have your opticians explain each measurement taken by your personalized lens technology, including how those measurements create vision that is up to two times sharper than the vision they currently experience in traditional ophthalmic lenses.
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Offer Personalized Lenses as a Practice Differentiator
Optometrist to Dispensary Hand-Off: An Open Dialogue Can Improve the Outcome
Rajeev K. Raghu, OD, FAAO, is the owner of The Eye Center at Jackson in Jackson, NJ. To contact him: drraghu@theeyecenteratjackson.com.
