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Optical Express Shares Clinical Data with Laser Eye Sector
1st July 2009
Optical Express has revealed its working practices to its refractive surgery competitors in a supplement published in the July edition of the Journal of Refractive Surgery.
Released with the intention of helping the refractive surgery industry as a whole, the supplement contains articles detailing Optical Express' practices, research outcomes, patient satisfaction, biostatistical analysis and patient selection methods.
Medical Director for Optical Express, Steve Schallhorn, told Optician:
"We've laid open our doors like no other provider has. We've explained what our clinical model is, how we deal with the rare cases where we have patients who have problems, how we manage those problems, our outcomes, what patients think about our procedures and how we can employ continuous improvement to get even better results."
Explaining why Optical Express chose to publish the supplement, Schallhorn said:
"What we want to do is raise the bar for everybody. It's many of our inner workings laid out for anybody in the business to see. This will be of benefit to our competitors, which will improve their outcomes of laser vision correction, which will improve patient awareness and satisfaction which will benefit the industry as a whole and so benefit us."
Schallhorn said continuous quality improvement of the industry was important for the growth of the refractive surgery market by encouraging satisfied patients to recommend the procedure to their friends. Citing the US as how big the UK laser surgery market could grow, he said:
"In the US the laser market is more mature, it's more common, well known and more accepted. It's evolving towards when someone turns 18 or 21, they'll consider laser eye surgery. In the UK, it's probably just a matter of time for attitudes to change. If you have surgery done and you have a realisation of what it can do and how it can change your life, you'll tell your friends and buddies about it."
Download the July edition of the Journal of Refractive Surgery here
