r/optometry

I have been working as an optometry tech for a little over a year, and I love it a lot. My OD paid for me to the AOA convention in my state to get some training, and I feel like I’m getting pretty knowledgeable about my job. I’d like to learn more of the billing/insurance side but I feel like I’m getting there.
I love my position and I’m working toward getting my CPO certification, but my husband and I also would like to have kids soon. I don’t have any family in the area that could watch a baby, and if I paid for daycare I would really just be breaking even. Is there any hope for a fully remote optometry job that would let me be home with a kiddo, or should I be looking toward a career change?

I am an optician apprentice and I help a lot of contact lens patients in our office after their eye exams. Oftentimes when I get a new presbyopia patient try on contacts with a monovision prescription, they complain that they can read just fine but distance is still blurry. So they insist on getting it rechecked with the optometrist, but almost every time the optometrist just tells them “You’ll get used to it”.

So instead of having them go back to get a recheck and back up our patient flow, I want to be able to explain to them how and why it works and see if that helps. This happens with multifocal contact lens patients as well, but not as often as monovision.

Please bear with me [29 F] on this, it’s been something I’ve been trying to grapple with to the point that I’m turning here for advice 😭

Due to numerous family member health crises, I was not able to enroll in grad school after graduating college, so I am pretty late to enrollment in general. I got accepted into both Optometry and Dental programs. I’m trying to decide what to go into. I have done extensive shadowing of both, and I love both fields for different reasons.

Dentistry

Pros:

- As close as you can come to an intersection of Art and Medicine (I love Art, I would’ve gone into it professionally if that had been a viable career path for me)
- Deals with aesthetics and improving people’s confidence
- A solid salary, maybe ~$50k more than Optometry with a higher ceiling to earn as well (let’s say $150-250k)
- I’m in a situation where it would be three years instead of four years, saving me one year – given my age, saving that one year feels like a pretty significant difference since I’m quite late to grad school

Cons:

- Tuition is half a million dollars (I am fortunate enough that with personal savings combined with familial contribution, my family should be able to help me pay for most, if not all, of it over the four years… but this is still very significant)
- Back problems and hearing loss – a lot of dentists develop both over time. I already have some mild back pain from scoliosis

Optometry

Pros:

- Cleaner work environment, no emergency calls or dealing with invasive procedures involving blood and saliva
- Also a highly rewarding field, helping people maintain their most important sense
- Much lower tuition, probably a quarter of dental school
- Significantly more flexibility - optometrists can pick up locum/fill-in work at offices that need coverage on a day-to-day basis without committing to a fixed schedule

Cons:

- I don’t know if it’s quite as mentally engaging as dentistry - there seems to be a lot of repetition with vision exams unless you’re specializing
- Less money with a much lower ceiling for long-term salary prospects (let’s say $130-150k)
- 4 years instead of 3
- The field skews very heavily female, and if I’m honest, I’d prefer a more balanced professional environment day to day

More discussion:

I think vision is our most important sense by a long shot, and helping people maintain theirs would be a deeply rewarding career. I’ve also had my own vision journey, having very poor sight myself. At the same time, I love the artistic aspect of dentistry, the fact that you see patients with more regularity, and that it too is an incredibly fulfilling field. What I love about both is that they’re careers where I can make a real positive difference in someone’s life and feel fulfillment in what I wake up to do every day, while also earning a comfortable salary.

If it weren’t for the tuition, I think dentistry would offer more return for the same years of education - and one less year in my case. As someone who wants to have a family someday, I know I would be fully comfortable supporting them on a single dental salary, though I’m less certain I could say the same for optometry.

On flexibility and family:

One of my long-term goals is to eventually be a full-time mom. I had a difficult experience being raised by people who weren’t my parents, and being present for my own children has been a deeply held value since I was young. With that in mind, optometry’s locum/fill-in structure is a meaningful pro - I could step away and return to work on my own terms without being locked into a fixed patient schedule. Dentistry requires more continuity in patient care, so even part-time work would mean set days with less flexibility.

I also want to note that I have no interest in owning a private practice - the added business management and responsibility would conflict with my priority of being present for my family. This actually lowers dentistry’s earning ceiling for me personally, since practice ownership is one of the primary ways dentists grow their income significantly beyond an associate salary.

I also need to think honestly about whether I would have broken even on dental school’s tuition by the time I transition to part-time or stop working to raise children, given how significant that cost is.

To summarize:

These are two amazing choices that I worked extremely hard to get accepted into, and neither is the “wrong” choice - but I want to go into the one that is the best fit for me as an individual. Whatever I choose, I’m going to dedicate myself to it fully and make sure I give my patients the absolute best care I can. I’d love to hear from anyone with insight or experience in either field. Thank you in advance!

Our IT provider recently closed, so we're looking for a replacement. We'd like someone who understands healthcare and HIPAA and can support everything from EHR. Our previous provider handled everything remotely, so we're completely fine with working with a company anywhere in the US as long as they're responsive and reasonably priced. Permission to post MODS. Thank you

Does anyone know where can I sell my Keeler BIO and tonotip?

Hi. OD3 here wanting to inquire about ocular prosthetics. I know that this falls under an ocularists role but I am wanting to see if ODs have any pathway to fabricating prosthetics as well? As far as I’m aware, we are able to fit prosthetic contact lenses but that is not what I am particularly interested in.

Have any of you known or could provide sources of any ODs working with prosthetics or potentially fabricating them themselves? Or anything else y’all could tell me about what we’re able to do with them? Any residency pathways that could lead to prosthetic work?

New patient, previous contacts lens wear. Patient does not know brand or power. What’s the norm?

Do docs normally write out the new cl rx without a follow up? Or are they required to come back for a follow up before a finalized cl rx is written out.

Any feedback appreciated.

What are some of the goofiest terms you've heard when patients are trying to refer to astigmatism?

I have heard:

1. "I have a stigma"

2. "I think my glasses are for a sigma"

3. "I found out I have a stigmata"

...That last one almost made me LOL in front of the patient

https://preview.redd.it/b5bkr4y2lfah1.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&s=9f5afca889e4f6783acc0593e60388e544634a83

Looking for some quick feedback on buying an OCT. I have three quotes on the table:

1. Topcon Maestro2 (new) – $43,000 (Windows 11 & 1-year warranty)

2. Zeiss Cirrus 5000 (Used)– $38,000 (Windows 10, no warranty)

3. Optovue iVUE 80 (new)– $32,000 (Windows 10, 2 year warranty)

Is it bad logic to pay a premium for the Maestro2 just for the Windows 11 peace of mind and the ease of use?

Or is the Cirrus 5000 a much better clinical investment, even if I have to pay out-of-pocket for a Zeiss PC workstation upgrade down the road?

What would you do? Are these prices fair for the current market?

it’s time- what are your best tips for new grad optometrists? Any great peds tips would be appreciated as well.

Been doing billing work with a few independent OD practices and keep running into the same gap. Every practice has some version of a rule for medical vs vision routing but almost none of them have it written down anywhere. It's just passed verbally from whoever trained the new hire.

Curious how this actually works for practices that have been doing it well for years. Do you have an actual document or checklist new front desk staff go through, or is it more learn-as-you-go with the doctor correcting mistakes as they come up.

Also curious if anyone has measured how long it takes a new hire to get the routing decision right consistently. days, weeks, months.

Trying to understand if this is just an unavoidable part of high turnover roles or if some practices have actually solved it..

Have you ever had one those days that just feels like it has to be a full moon day and then you check the lunar calendar and sure enough there's a full moon that night?

Not scientific at all but yet crazy accurate. Anyways, hope you all made it through.

Has anyone received their letter of good standing to transfer BC license to AB from the BC college from the class of 2026? I requested 1 mo ago but have not heard anything.

Optometrist with almost 15 years experience here (in Australia) and the market is dire - no real pay rises for a decade.

Has anyone here successfully moved from clinical work to something else?

Does anyone have experience with using professional/ provider mortgage loans for first time home owners? I’m a new grad that wants to get in a house sooner rather than later and the loans offering 0% down with no PMI seem rather appealing. I’ve looked into a couple different banks in my area that offer it and Flagstar is one that comes up a lot and was wondering if anyone has experience working with them??

Is anyone selling and OD1 or equipment for optom school in general? If so, PLEASE send me a pm!

Hi, I used to live in Florida and I will not ever be living there in the future. But I still have the Florida optometrist license. However it’s hard to fly to Florida to keep up with the CE requirements and pay their fees every 2 years.

For those who have the Florida license but don’t live in Florida anymore, what do you recommend ? Give up my license or keep it ? I know Florida optometrist license is very hard to get p, but it’s also hard for me to fly to Florida every 2 years just to keep it

We're a two-doctor optometry practice that's been growing steadily and I'm at the point where the manual follow-up stuff is eating into time that should be going somewhere more useful, we're still calling patients to confirm appointments, still sending reminder cards in the mail for annual exams, still manually requesting reviews which we do once in a while when someone remembers.
I know there are tools that automate all of this and I've gotten sales calls from a few, but I'm also aware that healthcare practice software is a space full of things that promise more than they deliver and contracts that make it annoying to leave if it doesn't work out. The math I keep doing in my head: if we reduce no-shows by even 3 or 4 per month and recapture a couple of lapsed patients who were due for an annual and slipped through, the tool pays for itself at almost any price point they're asking, but I need to believe the automation actually produces those results rather than just making the spreadsheet look nice.
What has the actual experience been?
Not the sales deck version, the real version.

For those of you who use Olleyes virtual visual field (or other VR headsets for VFs) for glaucoma testing, do you have your patients do the testing while getting dilated? Or do you want until they finish the testing to get dilated?