News from the AOA's Blog

A couple of weeks ago my son was sitting in the kitchen when he said, “Guess what I learned in school today? Women use more words in a day to communicate than men do.” Living in a houseful of men, I could have provided the testimonial on that, as could many of you who have only women in your household. 

Communication.  The word has been used a lot lately. It’s funny in a way that for the last two weeks  I’ve heard a lot about the lack of communication. In our Grafton office right now, we have a literal lack of communication. Freezing rains have brought down the lines that bring us access to the Internet! Read the rest of this entry ?

This time of year I find myself resolving and cleaning. Each year, Mark and I sit down to set our goals for the upcoming year. We started this the year we were married. It might have had something to do with opening our first practice within two years of our wedding, but regardless, we’ve kept up the tradition. Read the rest of this entry ?

This is the time of year when I find myself reflecting back and thinking of what I’m thankful for – things like my family, friends, time at home to reconnect with people I care about and the fact that it’s early December and there’s still no snow on the ground outside!

I’m thankful for the opportunity to visit the White House yet again this year. The most recent visit was to deliver the Joint Statement developed by the School Readiness Summit held last April. We had 31 different organizations sign the statement, which calls for comprehensive eye exams to be the foundation of children’s care, in order to make sure that they have every chance to succeed in school. Read the rest of this entry ?

I can’t walk 10 feet at a meeting without being asked, “Dori, can we talk to you for a minute?” or have a finger being pointed in my chest, followed by, “What are you (AOA) going to do about those schools?”   It makes for interesting conversations at times, and I thought I would open up that conversation to more than just those few individuals. Read the rest of this entry ?

And the earth shook in fear when I arrived in Washington, D.C., to visit with Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Okay, perhaps that’s a little bit of a stretch, but it is true to a certain extent. Read the rest of this entry ?

I grew up on a small grain farm in northern Minnesota with parents who never had anything beyond a high school education. My father was well-known for some of his sayings – many of which we repeat in our household to this day. One of his favorite sayings when I was a kid was, “When times get tough, they can take your house. They can take your car.  They can take all your worldly possessions, but they can never take away your education. You need to get an education.”  Read the rest of this entry ?

My 77-year-old patient, George (not his real name), was waiting for me to get home from Optometry’s Meeting® in Salt Lake City in June. On that Monday morning he appeared in my office stating that for the last few days he had been noticing intermittent episodes of blurry vision. He lives a half-hour from me and one and a half hours from any other provider. He knew there was something wrong, but traveling to another provider wasn’t something he could easily do. As it turned out, he was having intermittent angle-closure attacks, and I helped him get the care he needed. He’s doing well. Read the rest of this entry ?

Editor’s note: this column contains excerpts from the inaugural address given June 18 at the AOA House of Delegates.

It’s a beautiful day to be an optometrist! Much has been said of a woman finally ascending to the office of president of the AOA. While I have tried to not make much of this, I want to share THIS story. In James Gregg, O.D.’s book, “American Optometric Association – a History,” he wrote about a meeting of the American OPTICAL Association, which took place in August of 1911. He wrote: “Mild revolutions began at the 1911 convention at the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City, and some precedents were broken. The ‘revolt’ came from the West; and as might be expected, California was in the center of the ruckus. Perhaps fortunately, it was a lady, Mrs. D. Elva Cooper, an AOA member from Bradford, Pa, who delicately presided over the stormy session.” Read the rest of this entry ?

So much has changed in the year since the passage of Health Care Reform in March of 2010. This past year, we have seen the biggest major access victories that the AOA has ever delivered for our patients in the form of the Harkin Amendment and also the classification of Children’s Vision as an Essential Benefit.

It has become evident that the AOA and the state associations have had a unified goal to help our members THRIVE and SUCCEED. Never before has optometry needed the state affiliates and the AOA more than today.

The AOA has incorporated the Health Care Reform implementation guidelines, and the entire AOA team (which includes the staff and volunteers) has developed working action plans from mid-2010 to 2018, with the majority of implementations for the Health Care Reform timeline between now and the year 2014. We have already seen that the regulatory avalanche is starting, which includes electronic health records (EHRs); e-prescribing (eRXing); “meaningful use” and the increased importance of Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS); and also the development of Health Information Exchanges (HIE), and continues at a frantic pace toward a value-based health care purchasing system in this country.  Read the rest of this entry ?

If you don’t know who you are, you can’t possible get to where you’re going. 

For the health and well-being of our patients and future success of our practices, it’s critical that we define, once and for all, who we are and where we are at on the roadmap when it comes to Medicaid.

H.R. 1219, the Optometric Equity in Medicaid Act, will allow us to do just that.

Introduced by AOA supporters Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), H.R. 1219 seeks to avert a potential crisis in access to primary eye care for Medicaid patients by amending the federal Medicaid statute to fully recognize optometrists to provide “medical and other health services to the extent those services may be performed under state law.” Read the rest of this entry ?