Cart 
Original Article Published in Vision Source OD magazine. Learn more about Vision Source here.
Ryne Wood, OD, who started his eye care career as a clinical technician at Leet Eye Care in 2007, says he has never practiced without Marco equipment. After his graduation from the University of Missouri-St. Louis College of Optometry in 2011, he returned to the practice, which currently has four locations.
The practice fully engaged with technology from Marco—ranging from the Tonoref II, which combines the technologies of autorefractor, keratometry and noncontact tonometer in a space-saving design, to VisuALL units and Phoenix meibographers, as well as the classic lane equipment from Marco.
In the primary location, 10 automated lanes accommodate the four ODs who work there. These lanes feature the TRS-6100 automated refraction system. In addition, there are another five or so lanes that are equipped but with manual phoropters. “We work in pods of three exam lanes, with two auto lanes and one manual. We try to do our follow-ups or emergency visits in that manual room,” Dr. Wood says.
Efficiency is important with the volume of patients that come through the office. “We see 80 to 100 patients a day, and we’re scheduling patients about every 15 minutes. We move in between the exam lanes, and we wouldn’t be able to manage this volume without the efficiencies that our Marco equipment brings,” he says.
Technicians see patients in pretesting where the Marco Connect system automatically integrates readings into the electronic health records. The practice employs scribes, which adds to the doctors’ efficiency in seeing a high volume of patients.
Knowing that when he arrives into the exam room and all the patient data is ready for him allows him to learn about patients’ visual needs or concerns right away.
The refractions are fast and effective, he says. “I’m a fan of the split prism system,” he says. The split prism function in the TRS presents both of the automatic Jackson Cross images to the patient. “It’s more efficient and we get better answers than when patients have to determine which image is clearer,” he says.
Dr. Wood completes the refraction himself. “I just follow the program,” he says. But in that short amount of time, he can also have a conversation with patients. Because the scribes take the notes, he can focus on the patient.
Visual field headsets are game-changers
The practice has brought in about a half dozen of the Olleyes VisuALL multifunction virtual reality systems from Marco. The practice uses those for visual fields primarily, but the headsets can also be used to test patients’ color vision, contrast sensitivity and more.
“We’ve seen a big change since we added those. Taking visual fields was sometimes cumbersome. Maybe the ergonomics weren’t good for the patient, or we felt like we weren’t going to get good results with the way we did them before,” he says. But now, we can do a bilateral field in three or four minutes. So we’ll typically say, ‘Let’s do it today.’ It’s better for the patient and for us to have those results right away,” he says.
As a result, the practice has seen a 147% increase in visual fields performed. Dr. Wood says because the tests are now fast and reliable, he turns to the option more quickly. “If a patient comes in with a complaint that’s maybe a little strange, I’ll suggest we run the field test to rule things out. We’re detecting a lot of diseases that we didn’t know about before,” he says.
Patient education
Dr. Wood wants to make the biggest impact he can on patient education in the time he has with them. The Marco iON slit lamp imaging system is another tool he uses to share information and images with patients. “We use a mirroring program so that our technician is running one and the other identical monitor is for images. We can cast the iON images or retinal images that we’ve taken onto the computer and show the patient. It helps with compliance when we can show patients what we’re seeing,” Dr. Wood says.
In the smaller offices of Leet Eye Care, the Marco OPD-Scan III is a tremendous space saver that provides the doctors with a similar amount of information. “We have two OPDs in our smaller offices, and we use them for autorefraction, topography, keratometry and wavefront aberrometry.”
Because Dr. Wood has been working with most of this diagnostic technology for his entire career, it’s sometimes easy to forget how much efficiency it brings to the process, he says. “Being able to show patients with a click what their correction looked like when they walked in and what it can look like with new eyeglasses is so important to their experience, too.”
