Veteran receives next-generation eye care

Virtual eye care

At 56, Air Force Veteran Ben Parks thought he had seen it all when it came to eye care.

For 27 years, his community eye care providers had been monitoring a freckle in the back of his eye. He had been seeing his eye care provider regularly for checkups, which involved having his eyes dilated—a procedure he hated.

Then, six months ago, Parks moved to Livingston, Mont., and decided to enroll in VA health care. When his new primary care provider at the Travis W. Atkins VA Clinic in Bozeman referred him to the eye care services in their building, he was prepared for another typical eye visit: dilation and examination.

Instead, he met Amber Decamp, a VA Health technician with 29 years of experience in ophthalmology.

“The equipment at the Bozeman clinic is truly next generation,” Parks said. “Amber explained that with the new equipment she has, we likely didn’t need to do the dilation, and, in fact, we did not.”

Connecting Veterans with specialty care

Decamp performed Parks’ intake, ran the appropriate tests and reached out to his previous community providers for his records. She then let him know that a VA eye care provider would contact him with his results in the next few days.

Optometrist Grace Brown Bissonnette called him the very next day to explain his results, propose a treatment plan and answer his questions.

“[The process] was super seamless for me,” Parks shared.

The importance of virtual eye care

VA offers a wide variety of different programs that allow Veterans to receive eye care via telehealth, some which have been operational for more than 20 years. There are three main programs:

• Tele-Eye Screening: Screens for common diseases like diabetic retinopathy through eye pressure tests and photos.
• Technology-based Eye Care Services (TECS): Provides glasses and ocular health screens.
• Tele-Low Vision: Provide Veterans with rehabilitation to maximize their visual function.

In total, VA Telehealth has more than 700 sites of eye care and covers >85% of the VA’s network of hospitals and clinics, making it one of the largest and most robust telehealth deployments in the world. 

The program highlighted here is Montana’s TECS program, which provides routine vision exams, eyeglass prescriptions and monitoring/treatment for common eye conditions. TECS has been operating for more than 10 years and has more than 100 sites across the country. It is staffed by VA ophthalmologists and optometrists offering routine and specialty eye care to Veterans who live in areas that may not have any local eye care providers.

For Parks, it saved him from having to drive a long distance to another clinic in Montana.

“The fact that I can see a great eye care provider without having to travel even farther to Missoula or Helena to get care is great,” he said.

Parks has also been taking advantage of VA’s other virtual care resources. He uses the secure messaging service on My HealtheVet to refill prescriptions and schedule appointments.

Talk to your VA care team today to learn about what telehealth eye care options are available to you. To learn more about the types of care available through telehealth, visit VA Telehealth Services. 

The programs highlighted in this article, Technology-based Eye Care Services (TECS) and National Subspecialty Ophthalmology Network (NSON) were made possible because of funding by the VA Office of Rural Health through grant numbers #PROG-0000027 and #PROG-0000113.