Are you interested in building your practice? Make sure to register for the second webinar in a three part series called Your Practice in Focus. This webinar series is in partnership with ODWire.org and will focus on important topics and trends that will help eye care practitioners build their practices. Make sure to attend all three if you can!

The second webinar in the series is Fitting Patients with Multifocal Daily Disposables.

According to a recent study, 25 percent more people globally are expected to become presbyopic by the year 2020. This is incredibly significant given that the pool of presbyopes is already estimated at more than one billion worldwide.

Is your practice ready?

Many eye care practitioners find that multifocal contact lenses can be hard to fit, and that success with patients is not always a guarantee. And given the limited daily disposable options for presbyopes, it has been hard to build out a robust multifocal practice for some eye care practitioners.

CooperVision is offering this free webinar on fitting multifocal patients with Proclear® 1 day multifocal contact lenses on May 30, 2012 at 9:00 pm EST. The webinar will introduce a new, simple to fit, daily disposable multifocal lens that you can use to build out your multifocal practice.

CooperVision’s Senior Manager of Clinical Research, Paul Chamberlain, will go over the basics of this exciting new product and answer all of your questions about this new contact lens option for your multifocal patients. Make sure to register here for your chance to learn about this innovative new contact lens and expand your practice.

CooperVision held a webinar on making daily disposables a significant part of your practice on March 21. Did you miss it? Don’t worry; you can always access it in the OD Wire archive.

Daily disposable lenses have many advantages over other lens modalities. Whether its ocular health, convenience, or compliance, there are a variety of reasons that eye care professionals should consider making 1 Days a significant part of their practice. Are you ready to make "1 Days" a major part of your contact lens practice? This webinar, hosted by Dr. Kerry Gelb, offers concrete and practical advice on how to boost 1-Day usage in order to make this modality a large portion of your contact lens practice.

Specifically, Dr. Gelb discusses:

• Advantages of 1 Days for Patients
• Patient Compliance with 1 Days vs. Other Modalities
• Overcoming a Patient's Financial Concerns with 1 Days
• Trends in Market Share & Growth and How to Leverage These in your Eye Care Practice
• A Discussion of the Greater Acceptance of the 1 Day Modality

Dr. Kerry Gelb graduated with honors from the Illinois College of Optometry and completed a one-year residency in the Diagnosis and Management of Ocular disease. He has been practicing in Woodbridge, NJ for the past 22 years. Dr. Gelb has been interviewed on both radio and television on topics related to ocular health. He frequently lectures on the topic of building a "One Day" contact lens practice, and has extensive knowledge and experience in the evaluation and fitting of specialty or "hard to fit" contact lenses.

You can access the Daily Disposables In Your Practice webinar here if you missed it the first time around!

As the weather gets warmer, eye care concerns for contact lens patients can change. Here are some contact lens tips and trends for spring 2012:

• Learn About Computer Vision Syndrome
Since the announcement and pending arrival of the iPad 3 this spring, eye care professionals are getting more concerned about the possibility of computer vision among patients who use smaller electronic devices. Computer vision syndrome is a term used to describe a a group of eye and vision related problems that stem from the extended use of a computer. The most common symptoms of computer vision are: eye strain, headaches, blurred vision, dry eye, and neck and shoulder pain. Eye patients with computer vision may want to consider a contact lens that provides improved comfort for mild dryness or symptoms relating to dryness during lens wear. CooperVision’s Proclear lenses are the only contact lenses that are approved by the FDA to do just that.
• Beat Allergies
Allergy sufferers know that their allergies seem the worst in the springtime. One of the worst things about allergies is that they make contact lens wearers suffer from red, puffy, and itchy eyes. As we wrote in a previous post, daily disposables may be recommended to allergy sufferers over other contacts since they are discarded after each use; eliminating the accumulation of allergy-causing debris on the lenses from day to day. In fact, there have been clinical studies that show how daily disposable lenses can significantly reduce the number of eye symptoms among allergy sufferers. CooperVision Proclear One Day daily disposable lenses may be an option to consider.
• Avoid Water
Make sure that you don’t wear your contact lenses while swimming in lakes, showering, or even washing your face. All of that water can lead to exposure to the Acanthamoeba , an organism that commonly lives in tap water and lakes and can lead to difficult to treat, painful, and even blinding infections," explains Thomas L. Steinemann, an ophthalmologist and professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, OH.

Remember to stay tuned to the On Eye Blog for more information about your eyes and contact lenses.