AFTER PRACTICING IN NEW YORK FOR MANY YEARS, I moved to Arizona, where my wife and I were bit by the entrepreneurial bug. Against advice from most of our friends, we opened a new practice, Phoenix Eye Care, cold. At the same time, I wanted to pursue my long-standing passion for dry eye and ocular surface disease in a more focused way, so we launched the Dry Eye Center of Arizona — a practice within our primary care practice. Assuming many physicians would already be focusing on dry eye in the arid Arizona climate, I was initially unsure of how successful such an endeavor might be. As it turned out, very few practices in the Phoenix area focused on dry eye. This left a substantial unmet need and led to rapid practice growth and success.

Despite all of the attention being paid to dry eye, a significant unmet need still exists across the country. In fact, the need is actually increasing. In addition to the populations we expect to have dry eye — for example, the elderly and post-menopausal women — more and more younger people are also developing dry eye, due in large part to the explosion in digital device use and diets increasingly deficient in Omega-3s.

Focused exclusively on dry eye and ocular surface disease, the Dry Eye Center of Arizona has achieved a better than 95% success rate for effectively managing patients with dry eye and meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD). For many of our patients, this has been life changing. Dry eye care is one of the greatest opportunities in vision care and certainly a tremendous opportunity for optometry. In the following articles, I discuss what I consider to be the keys to the success of the practice (including a simplified treatment algorithm), how a dry eye practice can be enhanced by — but also started without — an investment in advanced technology, and the best way to interact with patients. •

Arthur B. Epstein, OD, FAAO is co-founder of Phoenix Eye Care in Arizona. He leads the Dry Eye Center of Arizona, Phoenix Eye Care's dry eye/ocular surface disease center, and serves as its director of clinical research. Dr. Epstein, a Distinguished Practitioner of the National Academies of Practice, has published hundreds of articles, scientific papers, and book chapters and has presented more than 1,200 invited eyecare lectures in more than 50 countries. He also serves as an editor or reviewer for numerous clinical and scientific publications.