In-Depth with Mike Sullivan: An Eye-Opening Chat with Jesse Ellis with Hello Abby!

Tune in as long-time Bay Eye Center patient Mike Sullivan and Hello Abby rep Jesse Ellis, discuss why Abby is the go-to solution for seamless contact lens reordering. Discover how it saves time and keeps you stocked up effortlessly!

TRANSCRIPT:

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Mike Sullivan: The grind is here. High school athletes, probably already practicing with their teammates; parents scrambling to get everything they need to get done as school kind of kicks off here. Bay Eye Center doctors very busy with eye exams and for children and adults, but I want to ask you today about contact lenses. Specifically, a software that allows us to order contact lenses. Can you tell us what that is and how it works, the convenience of it?

Jesse Ellis: For sure! So, the Bay Eye Center group recently started using the website Helloabby.com to process all of its contact lens orders. There's a couple of real benefits to the patient. One of them is obviously the contacts can be shipped right to your house so you don't have to try and coordinate time out of your schedule to stop by the office and pick up your products. Maybe you have to work around hours that they're open, holidays...doesn't matter. You can just place the orders, they'll get shipped to your house and everything that ships via Abby is no charge, regardless of the order size. You don't have to get a certain qualifying order size in order for it to ship to your home. One of the other big benefits is that you can actually track your orders yourself. You don't have to call the office to try and figure out where your lenses are. We'll automatically communicate to you with tracking information, we'll let you know when the product is shipped, when it's delivered, so that you can go out to your doorstep and grab it. And we'll actually send reminders to you down the line once you are getting a little low on your lenses, we'll send you some reminders to say hey, you are gonna be running out of your product pretty soon. Here's a link to reorder from Bay Eye Center. You can then proceed to the link, place the order yourself. That way, if it's 2 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday and you suddenly realize that you've got contacts you need to get in before the end of next week, you don't have to wait until Monday or Tuesday when the practice opens, you can place the order whenever you need to and you'll know that it's gonna be there in time.

Mike Sullivan: That sounds like a win win win win for sure! So for children, teens, and adults who are very active, switching to just contacts in general now, what advantages in general does wearing contacts over glasses provide?

Jesse Ellis: Yeah I mean, I'm a glasses guy and you can see I got these big bright red frames on. I'm a licensed optician in Massachusetts, I've been doing this for about 20 some odd years. I wear glasses the vast majority of the time, but there are certain activities that I do -- you know running, cycling, some shooting sports, that like you just can't comfortably wear glasses for all the time. Especially for kids, I mean if they're out on the field playing soccer, baseball, football, you know hockey, you can't really fit a pair of glasses like this underneath a helmet. So being able to wear contacts, even if they're not your preferred method of vision correction that you wear all the time, even wearing them occasionally and getting some like daily disposable contact lenses that you just put on as needed can be a big benefit. It's a lot more comfortable, you can get more crisp and clear vision, you don't have to worry about your glasses getting you know messed up, bent up, or just being generally uncomfortable along with whatever other gear you happen to be wearing. So they can be a big win for adults, kids, pretty much anybody.

Mike Sullivan: I have to say Jesse, you pull those red glasses off beautifully, so kudos to you sir! When it comes to contact lenses it turns out some are potentially better than others. Can you go over some of the main types of contact lenses and which ones you might suggest?

Jesse Ellis: Yeah for sure. So there's there's some real like granular nitty gritty, technical details about different materials and all that, that's not really something that, you as the patient, need to be that concerned with. The primary things are that you know contact lenses go through new iterations and versions every you know, we'll say 5 to 10 years. There's gonna be new materials that come out that have significant benefits for people who have like persistent dry eye, people who've tried certain contact lenses in the past and really haven't been successful with them because of comfort issues. There's also some contacts on the market these days that are more geared towards folks that do a lot on electronic devices, very much like there are you know some eyewear that kind of solves the same issues. But the thing that you really need to do is when you do meet with your doctor or your optician and you're talking about wearing contacts, don't necessarily assume that the ones you've been wearing for the last 10 or 15 years are the best ones. You wanna talk about what your lifestyle needs are, if you're spending a lot more time on the computer, well maybe it's time to try out a different contact that's more you know, a better fit for that sort of lifestyle activity.

The other thing you really gotta think about is what we call the modality. And that means how long is a set of contacts good for. You know years and years and years ago, people would wear lenses that they'd replace once a year, then there were lenses that we could be replaced quarterly. Now that's all back in the 80s and 90s, you don't really see stuff like that very frequently now. Right now it's usually monthly's, 2 weeks, and daily's, and pretty much every optometrist and physician in the market, every optician agrees that daily disposable lenses are really the best fit for almost everybody. There's a lot of reasons for that. Daily disposables are a lot better than they used to be. Many years ago they were kind of thick, they weren't really that comfortable, people had fit issues with them. Nowadays, really they're kind of the gold standard in the market.You know, some people get a little concerned that they might be a little more expensive, but realistically speaking, you don't have to clean them, you don't have to care for them every day. And if you've actually read the instructions on the bottle of cleaning solution, if you're wearing a two week or a monthly lens, I would say there's a pretty good chance that almost no patients out there are actually following the instructions that are on the bottle that tell you to do things like rinse the contact lens for 10 seconds under a continuous stream of solution. You know, making sure that you replace your contact lens case all the time. And then for those folks that wear contacts maybe three or four days a week, instead of seven days a week, like the folks doing the sporting activities we talked about, how do you actually keep track of how long you've had that set of contacts open? Have you had it for a month? Have you had it for a month and a half? Who knows? So the daily disposables remove all of the cleaning concerns from the equation.

They also remove the concern about potentially wearing a lens that's been sitting around a lot longer than it should be and the incidents of eye infection and eye injury related to daily disposable wear are essentially zero. If you've ever had a 2 week or a monthly lens that you've over worn, or not cleaned maybe as well as you should, and ended up with an eye infection... All it takes is getting that once and you really don't wanna have to deal with that ever again. And any savings that you got by wearing some of these, you know 2 week or monthly lenses, as opposed to daily disposables, well one eye infection and all those savings are out the window. So it's just healthier for the eyes -- much less likelihood of potentially permanent side effects from a bad eye infection. You don't have to worry about cleaning them, you don't have to keep track of all the other stuff. And from an environmental standpoint, most of the packaging is recyclable on all the daily disposable contacts and the amount of contact lens solution going down the drain is basically zero, which is also something to be concerned about with reusables so.

Mike Sullivan: Well said Jesse. I'm glad you brought that up because, you're a glasses wearer, I'm a contacts wearer since I think 7th grade, many, many years ago, but before I became a patient at Bay Eye Center I did wear the monthly contacts. And I go to the Mansfield office and Drew first recommended the daily disposable ones and it's it is life changing. You're absolutely right. I over wore my contacts longer than I should have and like you mentioned, the convenience of just popping in a new pair every day -- I know they're clean, they're super low maintenance, I don't even feel the lens in my eye. It's just so easy and convenient. I don't mind paying a little bit extra because to me, you get one set of eyes and I'm going to invest in them, so it's worth every darn penny for me. And every year that I get my annual exam, Drew or Jen will just automatically, you know order that year supply. So with the health advantages that you touched on there also comes a cost advantage because I save hundreds of dollars through rebates. Can you touch on any of that?

Jesse Ellis: Yeah absolutely. I mean, for most modern daily disposable contact lenses, the manufacturers are going to have rebates for

you know purchasing your supply of your lenses and sometimes they can be pretty substantial. I mean some of the rebates can be $150 to $300, depending on the the type of product. So when you really take a look at it, you know if you're breaking down a cost per month. You figure if you're looking at a $300-400 annual supply of a monthly or a 2 week lens versus a $600-800 supply of daily disposables -- well clearly, the daily's are more expensive. But if you're getting a rebate of you know $200-250 on the daily's, and the monthly's are only actually getting you know a $100 rebate if even, depending on the product. Plus you know, if you have some insurance that the practice can you know

take a portion of the contact lens purchase off with, I mean a lot of times you're gonna end up spending maybe just a couple hundred dollars for a year supply of these lenses and now you don't have to worry about those other complicating factors as well. When you have the practice team at Bay Eye Center go through what your actual cost is after rebates, after insurance contribution, you're gonna find it's probably a lot less than you might think.

And you know, we were talking a little bit about the eye infections thing, and not the harp on it, but just do yourself a favor or maybe a disservice depending on how queasy your stomach is, and just look up something called GPC, Gross Papillary Conjunctivitis. Gross is a accurate description of it. It is a type of complication from overwear of contact lenses that once you get it one time you are more prone to getting it in the future to the point that if you continue to get incidents of GPC, which you won't get with dailies by the way, it can actually contradict contact lens wear in its entirety. And the last thing you want as a contact lens wearer is your doctor to tell you -- bad news...you got too many eye infections over the years, you can't wear contacts anymore -- so there you go.

Mike Sullivan: That's not what we're aiming for Jesse. Thank you so much. I have learned a ton just from the short conversation so thank you so much. Is there anything else that you'd like the patients of Bay Eye Center to know about the ordering software, about contact lenses, about anything down the pipeline at all?

Jesse Ellis: No honestly, the biggest call out for patients with the Abby ordering platform is really just gonna be ease of use as the patient. Because Bay Eye Center is utilizing this service Abby, it gives you as the patient kind of the ultimate level of convenience. It's almost like an Amazon like experience with shopping for contact lenses. Your doctor puts in your prescription so we already know what the expiration date is. We don't have to wait for you know the doctor to confirm any prescription details cause they're the ones that put it in in the first place. You don't have to worry about accidentally ordering the wrong prescription because the doctors already put in exactly what you're wearing. And just the fact that you know, at a glance, hey, I can check and see when the last time I ordered lenses was anytime I want by logging in. When I place my order, I'm gonna know right from the point of order entry all the way through delivery to my doorstep, where that order is in the process. I can track it anytime that I need to. And if there's a problem with the order, you can actually call us using the customer service number on the website, even when your doctor's office is closed, and we'll be able to help resolve any sort of order or delivery issues for you.

Mike Sullivan: Sounds stress free to me, I'm in! All right, Jesse Ellis with Abby, thank you so much for being with us today and just being an expert. I learned a ton, thank you!

Jesse Ellis: Yeah it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me Mike.