Lens/Job Check-In & Verification Process

In your dispensary, it’s important that everyone does everything the exact same way as much as possible to ensure consistency in our patient experience. With the optician eyewear fit and prescription verification report, we can ensure that everyone checks in jobs the exact same way and doesn’t miss any steps every single time. Then you can put that into your optical policy and procedure manual. And most importantly, we can ensure that if we have the rare circumstance where a patient comes in, not happy with how they see out of their current new eyewear, that we have a proper list of steps to follow in order to properly troubleshoot and confidently handle the situation, without just simply telling our patient to wait a couple of weeks and it’ll get better. Let’s get started. 

First, if you’re dealing with a patient who’s unhappy with their new eyewear, we put the patient information, the date that we are seeing them, and the optician that is taking care of them.  Once we complete the remainder of the form, it’s advisable that we upload this into the patient record, so that everyone knows what happened and how we solved the problem. It’s important that if your patient is unhappy with how they are currently seeing out of their new eyewear, that we test how they are seeing out of their old eyewear. If they were happy with that old pair of glasses, we can take all the proper lensometry measurements for the prescription, the seg height if applicable, the pupillary distance that was used, and how they see out of that eyewear. Which means you might need to take them into an exam room to check their visual acuities. Once we have that information, we can go down to the current vs new eyewear measurements and also take measurements on the lens size, the lens height, the bridge size, and then how the frame actually sits on those patients face, the vertex, the wrap, the panto, and then finally the base curve measurement that you can use your lens clock to determine. Then we repeat all those same steps with the new pair of glasses. 

We take actual lensometry readings on the lenses themselves to ensure this prescription was made properly. Then we put the seg height that we used on our order, the pupillary distance, and then once again in the exam room, check their visual acuities, both distance and near. This way we can actually compare them to how they saw out of their current glasses, because sometimes patients will tell you they don’t see well, but you may not be sure what they mean by that. Then you can complete the information that was actually prescribed to compare it to what was actually measured. Then we go back to the current versus new eyewear measurements and put the information for the new pair of glasses between the lens size, the lens height, the bridge, vertex, wrap, panto, and base curve. Once you have all of this information completed, then we can look at the actual difference in data between the two pairs of glasses to figure out why our patient doesn’t feel like they are seeing well. Sometimes it’s as simple as the PD being off or the seg height not being the same as what it was in their old pair. In some instances, patients will wear their old eyewear differently than how you measured them for their new eyewear. Which is why we should always be paying attention to that prior to ordering the job. But if you look and the glasses are sitting farther away from your patients’ eyes than the new ones, we can adjust the vertex on the new ones, if there’s nose pads, to see how your patient sees then. If the wrap is greater in the new pair than the old pair, your patient might be complaining of a fish eye effect. If your patient feels that they can’t read out of the lenses or if they feel like they are too close, we might need to change the pantoscopic tilt as well. 

Finally, on this document, we have the ANSI standards for acceptable ranges of tolerance of difference in prescriptions when made from the lab, so that we can make sure when we are verifying prescriptions that they fall within the proper standards. At the bottom we have a checkbox for the frame fit to patient satisfaction and if you have a digital measuring device that you can verify all of these measurements with your digital measuring device. 

Once you’ve completed all of this, you’ll notice that most times you’ll have solved your patient’s problem by fixing one of these most commonly missed fit issues.