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VIENNA, Va.—While MyEyeDr. has grown and the company’s geographic presence has expanded (and continues to do so), the professional organization has worked to stay ahead of the group’s needs from a leadership and training perspective as well as a philosophy that enables optometrists to pursue specialized areas of interest, share knowledge with peers and elevate their professional capabilities to serve patients. At the start of 2020, there are nearly 990 optometrists within the MyEyeDr. network, spanning 570 offices in 26 states.

As Dr. Artis Beatty, chief medical officer, explained, “We are rapidly expanding our focus on optometry pathways, to shine a light on how a doctor can do more within the profession and also do more within the MyEyeDr. family. Among these:

• Our Leadership Summit brings our clinical leadership team together with our operations and home office leadership to focus on collaboration, patient enrichment, our purpose, promise, vision, and our company values. We invite and involve ODs based on their interests and hope to expose them to a variety of opportunities.





• Our Emerging Leader programs have included ODs since the program began in 2017. So far we have had over 24 ODs be invited into the program. Doctors who would like to increase their business acumen and/or lead other doctors in both clinical and business functions can participate in this, which is a multi-departmental cross-functional program that concentrates on leadership skill, remote leadership capability, emotional intelligence, and practical application to our business model. Graduates of the program are prime candidates for becoming clinical directors and/or joining the clinical leadership team.

• We began work on the Centers of Excellence in 2019 after feedback from doctors, student doctors, and our clinical field directors. This help ODs develop skills specific to their interests and modes of practice. We have developed protocols, educational points, mentors, and equipment needs specific to things like: myopia management, macular health, glaucoma management, dry eye management, and specialty contact lenses. ODs will get the opportunity to build selected elements into their practices depending on their skills and patient base. We did some pilots with select individuals and plan on expanding the participation in 2020.

• The MED PVA program at Alcon had an inaugural class of 45 ODs and we have scheduled our second class for 2020. We partnered with Alcon to provide an MED exclusive educational experience. MED doctors get the opportunity to travel to Alcon to participate in a clinical fitting and training program built around the MED patient experience.

• The CEO Ambassadors program provides opportunity for select ODs to gain an in-depth view of the overall workings of the entire company by spending time working outside of the office within the different functional areas of MED. The ODs are grouped with other high-performing individuals in the organization, and tasked (with the group) to problem solve an issue or pain-point in some specific area of the business.

He added, “We are also working to build an advisory panel of internal clinical experts combined with external industry professionals to make sure there is continued alignment between clinical and business needs and innovation.”

Dr. Beatty told VM, “Our doctors are supported by local leadership: Clinical Field directors are doctors who lead at the local office/geography level. They provide training, mentoring, clinical support, and clinically-specific operational support for each doctor. They also provide direct support of doctors as they become part of the MED team via integrations. The clinical field directors get their support from Regional Clinical Field directors. We support clinical performance through our Director of Clinical Excellence, an OD responsible for our overall clinical educational program, innovation, and implementation of new products and technologies.”