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EDITOR'S PAGE CVS: Optometry's Sleeper Subspecialty by Rich Kirkner I got a couple photographs this month from Vancouver, B.C. No, they weren't post cards of the snow-capped mountains that surround
Canada's hip West Coast city. They're photos of a sign that reads, "Laser Eye Surgery $999 Both Eyes!" It made me think of computer vision syndrome, or CVS. Well, that and the fact that Dr. Gary Osias
wraps up our four-part series
Do the math. Stephen Joffe, chairman and CEO of LCA-Vision, told me that laser vision centers anticipate doing 1 million to 2 million procedures this
year. Put that next to computer use: 70 million Americans are at them every day on the job; 140 million of them are tooling around the Internet; 30 million households have personal home computers.
That makes treating CVS the sleeping giant among optometry's subspecialties. Here's another reason why: Third-party payers such as Vision Service Plan and
Cole Managed Vision are striking deals with laser centers. Cole will provide discounts to covered members. Add in the fact that some U.S. cities are getting
saturated with laser centers, throw in those photos from Dr. Komarnicky, and you can get idea of where this is heading. Do the words "cataract surgery" ring a bell?
Besides, doctors aren't exactly enthralled about even more dealings with third-party payers. Doctors like comanaging refractive surgery because third-party payers hadn't caught up to it ... until now.
Of course, getting involved with laser vision correction makes sense for you. You need to make sure your patients are well informed, and you must see to it that
they're satisfied with the outcomes. And, those patients will always need eye care; just hope they have the good sense to realize that long-term.
Don't forget those multitude of patients, though, who are squinting and craning their necks to work at their computers. A thorough CVS work-up, a few words of sage
advice, a minor bump in their prescription, maybe a second pair of computer glasses, and you can be a hero to them. And, you can hedge your bets for the day a sign like the one near Dr. Komarnicky's
office comes to your town.
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Dr. Gerald Komarnicky sent them. The sign was in front of a laser center. And, if you're trying to calculate the exchange rate, it comes to about $750 U.S. Meanwhile, I've been getting other things in the mail
and by fax: almost daily press releases about a new laser center opening somewhere in the United States.
