Your 2025 Guide to Comprehensive Eye Care

Although many people associate getting their eyes checked with reading out a string of random letters from a distance, comprehensive eye care entails much more than a simple vision exam. While an exam is a good starting place, it is essential for many patients to explore comprehensive eye care and preventative screenings to catch symptoms of preventable eye disease early on.
So what exactly is comprehensive eye care, what does it entail, and why is it important to integrate into your practice?
What is Comprehensive Eye Care?
Comprehensive eye care is more than just a vision screening. Comprehensive eye care involves exploring a patient’s health history for genetic eye diseases and screening for new eye development of diseases or disorders through a fully dilated eye exam. These optical exams typically require a trip to an eye care specialist like an ophthalmologist. Appointments like this are especially important for patients living with diabetes, as they are particularly susceptible to preventable vision loss, and a diabetic eye care plan can be the key to preventing the onset of blindness later in life.
What is Involved in a Comprehensive Eye Exam?
Patient History
This first aspect of comprehensive eye care involves exploring everything from a patient’s family medical history to any eye problems they are currently experiencing. Providers may ask about a patient’s work or living conditions, medications, and preexisting health conditions to gain a full understanding of factors that could contribute to vision loss or eye disease.
Visual Acuity
This is the most well-known part of comprehensive eye care. A visual acuity test will involve the examination of eyes and vision with letter charts used as indicators of a patient’s vision strength. 20/20 vision is the goal for everyone, but a visual acuity appointment is the place to get a prescription for glasses and contact lenses if you have less-than-perfect vision.
If a patient is in need of visual aids, this test could be followed up with keratometry, topography, or refraction in order to make sure right-fit contact lenses are prescribed.
Eye Focusing, Teaming, and Movement Testing
Eyes must be able to move in tandem and change focus quickly for proper vision to occur. Assessing accommodation, ocular motility, and binocular vision helps determine how well a patient’s eyes work together.
Eye Health Evaluation
This is one of the most important parts of an eye exam. Apart from looking into a patient’s retina (which can sometimes involve dilation), microscopes, lenses, and digital technology are used to detect systemic eye diseases that would otherwise remain undetected to the patient and their doctor.
Supplemental Testing
Depending on a patient’s history and/or diseases, a doctor may order supplemental testing. For example, patients with diabetes will need an annual diabetic retinopathy exam, as diabetic retinopathy is a disease that individuals with diabetes often develop asymptomatically.
Comprehensive Eye Care vs Vision Screening
Although it’s easy to assume that 20/20 vision is the most prominent eye care issue to solve, vision screenings only scratch the surface of the tests that need to be performed for the health and well-being of patients. A comprehensive eye care exam is extremely beneficial for patients with diabetes in particular, who need yearly diabetic retinopathy exams.
Challenges of Comprehensive Eye Care
As important as comprehensive eye care exams are, a mere fraction of at-risk individuals participate in yearly optical exams. At-risk individuals include those who have a history of ocular disease, belong to a certain racial or ethnic group, have diabetes, wear contact lenses, or have had a previous eye surgery or injury.
Unfortunately, many eye diseases are asymptomatic in their earliest stages, meaning that patients often put off their comprehensive eye exams until after they start experiencing symptoms. The irony is that eye diseases are the most treatable before symptoms occur. Diagnosing a disease like diabetic retinopathy too late can put patients at risk for blindness.
So how can doctors provide patients with access to comprehensive eye care before it’s too late?
The Path to Effective Comprehensive Eye Care
Screening for conditions like diabetic retinopathy requires specialist care that many patient populations may not have access to. Technology can step in to fill in these patient care gaps and give primary providers the capability to perform testing that was previously only available in a specialist provider’s office.
IRIS, or intelligent retinal imaging systems, is changing the availability of comprehensive eye care across the entire landscape of healthcare.
IRIS gives primary care providers, in-home health providers, pharmacies, FQHCs, and health plans across the nation the ability to easily perform diabetic retinopathy exams and catch preventable eye diseases before it’s too late. IRIS simplifies the entire process, ensuring access to care for patients and ease of implementation for their providers.
An IRIS-trained camera operator takes fundus images as part of routine diabetes appointments and then sends the images to be diagnosed via a secure cloud-based platform. IRIS automatically applies a proprietary image-enhancing algorithm to brighten these fundus images. Next, a licensed and board-certified grader from the IRIS Reading Center interprets the images and expediently sends the diagnostic results straight back to your office’s EMR/EHR system.
With this model, IRIS helps its customers maintain HEDIS compliance and reduces the risk of sight loss in diabetic patients dramatically, as 90% of vision loss due to diabetic retinopathy can be prevented by early detection. This simple change in creating access to comprehensive retinal exams has resulted in a 4x increase in testing for at-risk patients.
Try IRIS and Provide Comprehensive Eye Care to Your Patients
Adding a retinal camera equipped with IRIS allows healthcare providers to give their diabetic patients a better chance at keeping their eyesight. In fact, IRIS’s efforts have contributed to over 146,000 “IRIS saves,” further supporting IRIS’s cause for putting an end to preventable blindness.
“Before [IRIS] at least 50% of our patients were unexamined. Since implementation that number has been cut in half, and at least 26% of patients who have undergone the examination have been diagnosed with some sort of ocular pathology that they would not have known about otherwise.”
– WILLIAM LEWIS, M.D., Harpers Ferry Family Medicine
Contact us here for a free demo, or see how your practice could benefit from a comprehensive diabetic eye care plan with a free ROI calculation.
Together, we can join the cause for preventable blindness through more accessible diabetic retinopathy exams and comprehensive eye care.
FAQs:
What does an eye exam consist of?
A typical eye exam consists of a visual acuity exam, depth, and peripheral vision tests, and receiving a prescription for glasses or contacts as needed.
How often is comprehensive eye care recommended?
For patients with diabetes or other conditions that could contribute to preventable eye disease, annual eye exams are recommended.
How is a comprehensive eye examination different from a vision screening?
A comprehensive eye care exam includes the standard elements of a vision screening, as well as a conversation about patient health history, eye focusing, teaming, and movement testing, an eye health evaluation, and any supplemental testing like retinal imaging with a fundus camera.
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