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THE STATE OF OPTOMETRY
How are You Doing? Rich Kirkner Editor-in-Chief Every August for the past several years, we've mailed questionnaires to 8,000 optometrists on eight different ophthalmic topics. We've drawn on this data through the years to help us identify trends in four key areas of optometric practice: therapeutics, ophthalmic dispensing, diagnostic technology and contact lenses. Of course, every year we also do our annual survey of optometrists' incomes, too. Last year, it hit us. We were sitting on a gold mine of data. Voila! Thus was hatched the idea for this month's special report, "The State of Optometry." Look at this as a bevy of benchmarks. You can use them to measure your own practice. Everything from annual income (Will that be corporate or private practice?) and new contact lens fits to the most popular ophthalmic drugs and ophthalmic lens add-ons. The overall size of the ophthalmic market was around $21 billion in 1998, the last year for which the AOA has figures. That takes in eyeglasses, contact lenses, disease management, ophthalmic surgery, primary care, low vision aids and vision therapy. Private optometrists have the largest share of that overall market: about 36%, followed by commercial retailers at 32%. It's a market that could get more competitive before things ease up. That's the story our special report tells. First up, we sent longtime Senior Contributing Editor Judith Lee a copy of the AOA's workforce study, and asked her to turn it inside out to figure out what it means to doctors like yourself in the trenches. Bottom line ... well, you can read that for yourself.
© Review of Optometry OnLine |
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