Close Look
How VSP / Eyefinity vNext is Transforming Eyecare for 85 Million Americans

Modern consumers expect their retail experience to be just as good online as it is in the real world. A tailored shopping experience is easy enough to digitize when you’re selling books or vacuums, but how do you do the same for something as personal and involved as healthcare?

A subsidiary of VSP Vision, Eyefinity’s network includes more than 85 million members, 41,000 providers, and 13,000 employees. When you’re in charge of 1 in 4 Americans’ eye health, good customer experience isn’t just nice to have, it’s imperative.

Eyefinity took on the challenge to enhance the healthcare customer journey by implementing a secure way to simplify and elevate the vision care experience—for both patients and providers. The goal: a hybrid, cloud-based experience that takes a customer from eye appointment booking to glasses purchase in a streamlined, powerful, connected way...without compromising patient privacy or breaking the bank.

‍By digitizing their processes and adopting a cloud-based practice and patient management platform, Eyefinity provides a personalized and data-backed optical retail experience.

Think about the eyecare experience’s pain points: remembering it’s time to make your annual appointment, for one; using up a work break to call and set one up...and waiting on hold for the receptionist; fumbling through your calendar to figure out which of the office’s times work for you; waiting in an agonizing call queue to notify the office that you’re running late before your appointment gets canceled; filling out forms every year in the store before you can even get in the chair. This is 2022—those inconveniences make no sense with the technology that’s out there!

To get to the vNext level, Eyefinity had to approach the retail experience from all sides: customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, HIPAA compliance, and business growth. While all retailers are subject to data privacy laws, healthcare companies like Eyefinity have an extra onus on them to protect their customers’ most personal details. So, they focused on the crossroads of people, data, and tech, designing a product that would enhance customer engagement with getting proper vision care, streamlining the appointment and ordering process for staff, increasing security for storing and accessing patient data, and optimizing business performance.

‍The vNext platform guides its users through a digitally augmented eyecare experience. Patients can schedule appointments online, check in remotely, ask questions, upload insurance information, and more—all online, anywhere, anytime. The only thing a customer has to do in person is the actual eye appointment (sorry, there’s no way to upload your eyes for a remote exam...yet).

Meanwhile, vNext provides in-store associates and doctors with tools to engage their customers in a whole new way via a mobile (tablet-based) app. Store associates streamline day-to-day processes involving point of sale (POS), patient records, insurance processing, and system operation. And, let’s be honest, it looks a whole lot better than cramped monotype lines in a spreadsheet-style system.

On the backend, the vNext software integrates with third-party eyecare organizations like insurance providers, labs, and manufacturers. Doctors and employees can request lab work, view test results, and handle the claims process in-app. This increases efficiency and accuracy, which means happy staff—and happy patients.

From quick access to patient records, to prescription updates, to inventory management, vNext’s functionality is changing operational procedures in the eyecare industry. Moreover, it’s changing the ease of access to benefits in the healthcare industry.

A shockingly large percentage of Americans don’t attend routine medical checkups and visits, including eye exams, even when they’re insured. That’s partially because there’s so much friction to creating and managing appointments: they’re easy to forget when they only happen once a year; they’re inconvenient to schedule, and they’re sometimes seen more as a chore than as an enjoyable experience.

vNext doesn’t just polish up a retail process, it gets more people through the door to take care of their eyes--and that’s the most important outcome of all. Prevention and early diagnosis of eye diseases saves people’s vision—and even their lives.