Eye Care in 2030: What's Coming, What to Ignore, and How to Prepare Now

One of the biggest structural shifts that I found interesting, but, because it affects where people get care and h-how doctors and clinics get compensated for that care, is this: care is moving out of hospitals and into the places where you work, where we work.

And this has been building for years, but the data now is pretty clear on this.

MedPAC, which advises Congress on Medicare spending, has been pushing toward what they call site-neutral policy, and the idea is that the same service should cost the same regardless of where it's delivered.

And that has big implications for hospitals, but for independent outpatient practices, it's actually an opportunity.

The economic and policy winds are really at our backs if we're delivering high-quality care in lower-cost settings.

But here's where it gets interesting for us, because it's not just about location.

The bigger shift is in what patients expect when they arrive.

Patients have been trained by every other industry to expect, you probably know what I'm gonna say here, convenience.

Convenience.

They track their pizza delivery in real time.

They book flights on their phone at midnight.

They get same-day delivery on almost anything.

And then they call a doctor's office, and they get put on holdtold there's a three-week wait and asked to fill out the same paperwork they filled out last year.

Press Ganey, one of the big healthcare consumer research organizations, found that, listen to this, the ability to schedule online and find accurate digital information are now primary drivers of how patients choose providers.

Not just nice-to-haves, but primary drivers.

And scheduling remains one of the number one friction points.

A lot of practices don't even offer this option, and even worse, they don't pick up the phone when patients call to schedule an appointment.

I- I've seen data showing that anywhere from 33, about a third, to 40-plus percent of calls go unanswered at optometry practices.

Think about that.

A lot of those people are calling to make an appointment.

They're calling to give you money, and nobody's answering the phone.

And before we go down a road of saying that you need a technology solution for everything, I think the more important question we have to ask, what do patients actually want? Ultimately, what they want is a frictionless path to a human.

What does that mean? Well, let's look at, uh, Pew Research that published data in 2026 showing that 75% of Americans still find it highly important that health information comes from medically trained sources.

So even among people who are regularly using AI health tools like apps and chatbots and symptom checkers, they still trust the clinician most.

They want the convenience of a great digital experience on the front end, and they want an expert waiting for them in the exam room.