As optometry students, you know that contact lenses are U.S. Food and Drug Administration Class II and Class III regulated medical devices, and improper contact lenses can cause serious complications. Doctors of optometry work hard to safely and accurately serve the 45 million Americans who wear contacts.
Unfortunately, a major loophole in federal policy threatens the safe vision correction for all of those patients: contact lens prescription verification via robocalls.
How a Loophole Harms Patients
Here’s the issue: The law that allows patients to buy lenses online, the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act (FCLCA), permits verification via phone, fax or email. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has interpreted the law to also allow for robocall verification.
This allows telephone calls with artificial or prerecorded voices (robocalls) to undermine the verification process. The information in these robocalls often go to a number not belonging to a doctor or fails to align with a patient’s medical record. This makes it difficult, or even impossible, to identify the proper prescription. With only an eight-hour passive verification window, and malicious actors using robocalls outside of work hours, patients are not receiving the prescription verification they need to ensure they receive the proper lenses.
While contact lenses are designed to correct vision, the wrong lens can cause irreparable harm. Substituting an inferior lens—without the patient’s or doctor’s knowledge—could lead to serious complications up to and including permanent blindness. Yet passive verification through this antiquated technology removes the critical step where a doctor ensures that the lens prescribed is safe for the patient’s eyes.
A Common-Sense Fix
We have a direct solution! The Contact Lens Prescription Verification Modernization Act (H.R. 4282) is a critical update to the FCLCA and an important safety enhancement for contact lens wearers across the country.
This legislation will ban the use of robocalls for verification and provide a mechanism to ensure contact lens providers receive and use only accurate prescriptions received from a licensed optometrist.
Your advocacy efforts fuel this work. The Health Care Alliance for Patient Safety is committed to closing loopholes within the existing verification process and stopping the substitution of lenses. Now we’re asking you to join us in this fight to reinforce the doctor-patient relationship and protect patient safety.
Take action today!
- Contact Your Lawmaker: Urge them to support the Contact Lens Prescription Verification Modernization Act (H.R. 4282).
- Expand Our Impact: Invite a classmate or colleague who cares about eye health and vision safety to sign up with HCAPS to strengthen our grassroots network.
Let’s work together to secure the safe practice standards that your future patients deserve!
