IcareLabs Blog

Before becoming the new Onboarding Account Manager here at IcareLabs, I worked for over a year in our finishing department mounting lenses for your jobs. With over 10 years of retail optical experience and being ABO certified, I wanted to share some tips for mounting lenses into Zyl frames. Hopefully, these tips can improve your finishing process to help keep your patients happy.

In our final installment of this three-part series on optical formulas, we are going to look into compound lenses and the optical cross.

When we first started writing blogs and sending out our monthly IcareFocus Newsletter, we did not know what to expect. We are often humbled by the amount of interest in our blogs. We are also sometimes surprised by the success of some and the lack of interest in others.

Here at IcareLabs, we pride ourselves in making learning a priority. Our sales, marketing, and customer service teams are constantly utilizing different resources to stay up to date with current products. This allows us to share with our customers the benefits of these new products as they roll out.

In today's modern lab with digital processing and the high percentage of jobs being processed with non-glare coating, cribbing has become the norm.  While many might be used to receiving cribbed lenses, I would figure that some do not understand why.

To better assist our customers and improve thickness and cut-out, we are expanding our database to begin storing frame information, including the shape and measurements of each frame. This is a brand new tool in our battle against thick lenses and cut-out issues.

While it has been many years since I have dispensed glasses, the memories of troubled patients are still fresh in my mind. I had the blessing of being trained under a master optician back in the days when this still meant something. I wish I could remember half of what he shared with me.

Through this training early in my career, along with hundreds if not thousands of calls working with dispensers over the last 18 years I've been with IcareLabs, I feel I have become pretty good at troubleshooting issues with a pair of glasses.

Much like a complex recipe, troubleshooting seems challenging from the outside. However, when broken down into individual steps it becomes effortless. In comparison with cooking, following each step in sequence makes even the most complex dishes seem easy.

Last month we asked for some input from our readers, both customers and prospects, on what content they would like to see in our newsletters. We had some good responses; one request was on fixed/variable progressives. While we have dug into this in the past it might be time for a refresher.

Never in the history of optics have your patients had so many options to choose from. With hundreds of progressive designs, multiple photochromic options, and a vast array of materials it is easier than ever to fill their needs.

The other day I had the pleasure of reading a very good article featured in 20/20 written by Palmer R. Cook, OD. He dug very deep into Chromatic Aberration and the effects it has on patients.

Part of my job here at IcareLabs is assisting our customers with trouble shooting problem patients. Often the issue is clarity or blur when not looking through the optical center. Lenses work great while looking straight ahead but with even minimal eye movement the clarity goes away. We always look at Rx, base curve, and lens design. This is the lowest hanging fruit.