Vision Care in the Workplace: Enhancing Your Health Benefits

Vision insurance is a great start when it comes to improving your employee’s eye health. For employers who want to go even further by offering unique and innovative health benefits, onsite vision care for employees could be the answer. Enhancing vision benefits can pay off big for employee retention, with one survey finding that 87% of respondents would be more likely to stay at a company that offered high-quality vision benefits. But on top of that, preventive eye care is a key piece of improving overall health.

Preventive eye care

Routine preventive care is important for catching health issues of all kinds before they become bigger problems. Including regular vision checks with preventive care is an easy way to keep your people at their best, particularly if you have an aging population.

But eye care isn’t only reserved for older generations. With digital eye strain becoming a common issue for anyone that works with screens daily, everyone should be proactive about taking care of their vision early in life. Vision issues can be a symptom of some more serious chronic conditions or issues, so staying on top of preventive care can help detect other health issues before they get worse.

Workplace eye safety

Many industries have specific workplace hazards that need custom eye safety solutions, whether that’s debris, chemicals, radiation or bloodborne pathogens. The good news is that injuries from these hazards are completely preventable, with safety experts estimating that 90% of injuries could be prevented with the right eye protection. An onsite vision provider can help prevent eye injuries by ensuring safety glasses are fitted correctly, or even provide virtual fittings to remote employees.

Vision and chronic conditions

Eye health can be both an indicator and a result of many chronic conditions. Diabetes, for example, can put individuals at risk for vision loss if uncontrolled.

This makes it all the more important to include eye care as a part of condition management programs to prevent complications from becoming severe. Optometrists who are integrated with an onsite wellness center can easily work within the broader primary care provider team to provide a complete spectrum of care to individuals with chronic conditions.

Convenient onsite vision care

Even the people who need regular vision care don’t always receive it. In fact, according to the CDC 40% of adults at high risk for vision loss did not receive an eye exam in the past year. So how can employers go beyond checking the box with insurance coverage and truly make vision care easier to access?

Putting eye doctors right where people live or work is a great way to ensure employees always have access to high-quality eye care. And making those vision centers exclusive to your employees means appointments are easy to get and your people aren’t wasting time in waiting rooms.

Think of how easy it would be to get your annual eye exam if you could just pop down to the vision center during a break in the workday. Or the relief of being able to quickly get in to see an eye doctor when your child starts complaining that the board at school is blurry. Putting high-quality, cost-effective vision care right at the workplace makes it a no-brainer for employees and dependents to protect and preserve their eye health with preventive care.

When it comes to bringing vision care that goes beyond vision insurance closer to employees, Premise is the right partner to call on. In addition to our experience creating state-of-the-art onsite vision centers, we offer the ability to integrate vision with primary care services, ensuring your people can easily access preventive care and regular exams. We can also integrate with an occupational health program to tackle workplace eye protection and provide immediate care in the event of a worksite injury. Whatever your employees’ needs are when it comes to eye health, we can create a custom solution to meet those needs.

Talk to us today about how we can make it happen.