I recently wrote about how VSP’s Eye Health Management® program helped the State of California generate significant healthcare cost savings (Million Dollar Service). This program focuses on VSP doctors identifying their patients’ symptoms of serious diseases such as diabetes. Then VSP shares HIPAA-compliant data with the patients’ health plan or disease manager to help ensure that they can proactively manage their disease.
A key reason for the importance of annual eye exams is that the eyes are the only part of your body that provides an unobstructed view of your blood vessels. During a comprehensive eye exam your eye doctor can observe abnormalities in these tiny blood vessels that may indicate symptoms of eye disease or systemic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. VSP network doctors have received advanced training and certification to diagnose symptoms of many medical conditions and treat some medical eye conditions.
Preventative care offers a path to early detection of serious health conditions -a key factor in managing disease, achieving the best outcomes, and ultimately reducing healthcare costs. Combined research from VSP, the U.S. Census, and the National Center for Health Statistics clearly demonstrates the important role of eye exams in preventative care. While 54 percent of the U.S. adult population has an eye exam each year, only 16 percent of the population visits a physician for preventative care. Since eye exams are three times more prevalent than physical exams, they represent an important opportunity for early detection and are a critical component in preventative care.
The eyes are truly windows into your health and a comprehensive eye exam involves a lot more than vision correction and picking the right glasses or contact lenses. As a nation looking to save every dollar we can on healthcare expenses, an annual eye exam for every person seems a reasonable and cost-effective way to make sure that we’re proactively addressing diseases before they result in major costs. Even more important than these cost savings are the lives we can make better along the way.
Eye Health Management® offers a tremendous opportunity to uncover a number of life-threatening conditions and I’m proud to say that VSP is the only eyecare provider that’s tackling this issue head on. I’ll look forward to your thoughts on how we can get more people connected to a comprehensive annual eye exam and identify other ways to generate healthcare savings in America.
Rob
