A Focus on Family, Fayetteville, and Future Growth

When I opened my practice in Fayetteville, AR, my vision was to provide care to families from infant to elderly, with a focus on Fayetteville and future growth. And thus, Family Focused Eyecare was born.

Family
At Family Focused Eyecare, we consider ourselves family doctors of eye care because of our primary care role in patients’ overall healthcare, from ensuring kids are prepared for school to screening for systemic diseases. 

For kids, we recommend starting with infant exams to get a baseline for the future; at a minimum, we want to see them before they start kindergarten. Since so much of how we process things is through the visual system, it’s much easier for kids to learn and succeed if we can make any needed corrections before school starts. And sometimes, kids deemed hyperactive or not paying attention have a vision problem that we can fix quickly to help them excel in the classroom. 

With our older patients, we screen for systemic issues they might not even be aware of. The most poignant example of this involves my wife. I was doing eye exams on my kids one weekend and decided to examine my wife as well since she had been complaining about blurry vision. Upon examination, I noticed a branch retinal artery occlusion, which stopped me in my tracks. We sent her to a retina specialist who confirmed the diagnosis and referred her to a cardiologist. The cardiologist did a CT scan of her brain and found a large unruptured aneurysm, so we immediately sent her to a neurosurgeon who did a craniotomy to repair it. To this day, she has a clean bill of health, thank goodness. All because of an eye exam.

Future
At Focused Family Eyecare, we differentiate ourselves by the personal care we provide to families in our community, and we continue to grow every year as a result. VSP and Premier Edge have had an enormous role in our growth, supporting us with training, marketing and hiring support, cost savings to help our practice grow and remain competitive, and increased visibility to patients. Our VSP and Marchon reps are in regular contact with us and have a genuine interest in how the practice is doing and how they can support us as we continue to grow. This includes providing and training us on products that benefit both our patients and the practice, like Marchon. I’ve been doing this a long time and have been around enough frame manufacturers to know which are our bread and butter—the Marchon brands are unquestionably one of our top-performing lines. Patients love the quality and the extra money they get to spend on frames, and the practice benefits from the high customer satisfaction and increased profitability. 

Focus
I heard an acronym years ago—KFC: Keep your focus, Find your center, and Check your motive. It really keeps us going every day—we focus on family, Fayetteville, and the future; base our decisions on our core values of faith and family; and strive to treat people the way we want to be treated. As Eye See It, this tenet is at the heart of what we do and is what will continue to set Focused Family Eyecare apart—now and into the future.