In Partnership with Neurolens

How can you stand out as an optometrist in your local community? Providing state of the art care and prescribing innovative solutions to your patient’s problems is a great way to set yourself apart. We sat down with private practice owner Dr. Melissa Richard on this podcast to discuss the technology that she has invested in to build her practice. 

Dr. Richard cold-started Spectrum Vision Care in Chalfont, Pennsylvania in 2015 with a focus on delivering comprehensive eyecare along with following her passion of providing low vision and brain injury rehabilitation services. “I knew early in optometry school that I wanted to specialize in something,” Dr. Richard shares. She was drawn to low vision care while she was a student at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, and completed her Masters in Low Vision Rehabilitation at the same time that she graduated as an OD. “I really enjoyed working with the visually impaired patients and giving them hope to read again or do the things they wanted to do.” 

Through building her name in the community with her low vision specialty, her scope of practice naturally expanded to serve patients that had suffered strokes as well as concussions. She built her educational base on how to best serve these patients with hours of independent research and regular attendance at the Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation Association (NORA) annual meetings.  About a year after attending her first NORA meeting, her father suffered a stroke which severely impacted his ability to read and navigate his world. The personal impact of treating her own father with yoked prisms and neuro-rehabilitative care made her mission to provide care to patients affected by brain injury or stroke in her community that much stronger because she witnessed first hand the ability that optometrists have to positively impact a person’s life and recovery after suffering this type of event.

“I think optometrists are totally underestimating how many of these patients are out there,” Dr. Richard states. Patients don’t necessarily schedule an appointment with an optometrist because of headaches or dizziness and might not even bring up a history of concussion or brain injury because they don’t know that it could be relevant to their eye exam. Her community had plenty of patients that needed her skill, but she didn’t have a great technology option to prescribe for their needs.

Dr. Melissa Richard, Founder of Spectrum Vision Care

Dr. Richard first learned about a technology that could set her practice apart called Neurolens at a NORA conference event. She had already been prescribing base in prism to many of her patients who suffered from headaches or chronic ocular discomfort, but she had found that her patients often needed separate distance and near glasses to accommodate the different amounts of prism that they needed at each working distance. The Neurolens technology was a perfect solution for her practice because it allowed her to prescribe one pair of glasses with a contoured prism to allow differing amounts of prism at distance and near. It was a slam dunk solution for her patients in convenience and ease of use.

What took her by surprise was how many of her every day patients benefited from this tech...