5 Things to Know
About Your Initial Evaluation at Our Charleston Vision Practice
To almost quote Amy Poehler in Mean Girls: “We’re not a regular eye doctor… we’re a cool eye doctor!”
If you’ve scheduled your first visit with us at Brighter Outlook Vision—or you’re thinking about it—you probably have questions. That’s great. Most people haven’t had an eye appointment quite like this one, and we want you to feel confident and prepared before walking through our doors.
We’re a different kind of eye care practice because we truly care about making people’s lives better, and to do that, we needed to break the mold.. As a specialty optometry clinic in Charleston, our mission is to help patients live better lives by going far beyond a standard eye exam. Here’s what you can expect:
1. This is not your typical eye exam.
A routine eye exam checks your eye health and whether you need glasses to see 20/20. But good vision is about more than clarity—it’s about how your eyes work together and how your brain interprets what you see. Functional vision includes over a dozen skills necessary for reading, learning, focusing, attention, and coordination.
At our practice, we assess:
- Eye tracking
- Focusing flexibility
- Eye teaming and binocular vision
- Visual processing and more
And this isn’t just a vision screening. School and pediatrician vision screenings miss up to 75% of vision issues and give less than 4% of the data a routine eye exam collects. Our comprehensive functional vision evaluation lasts about 90-minutes and uses interactive tools (some feel more like games than tests) to fully assess how your eyes and brain work together.
2. Dr. Jesse is not your typical eye doctor.
During your evaluation, you’ll spend 60–90 minutes one-on-one with Dr. Jesse Willingham, a developmental optometrist (also known as a binocular vision specialist, behavioral optometrist, or neuro-optometrist) and a children’s eye specialist. That means:
- He’s trained to assess how vision is developed over time—not just how well you see.
- He looks deeper at how your visual system functions and how it can be improved.
- He actually listens. No rushed visits or quick glances at your chart.
Dr. Jesse completed a residency in vision therapy and neuro-optometric rehabilitation, which equips him to uncover and address complex visual issues that often go unnoticed in traditional care. Learn more about developmental optometry.
3. We are not in network with insurance and that’s for your benefit.
Insurance companies are not concerned with your care and what is medically best, they are businesses that care about their bottom line. We know and we agree with you- it’s not right and it seems immoral.
We do care about you though- you are our neighbors and we want to treat you like we would our own family. So that we can provide the best care in a timely and efficient manner, we are not in network with insurance. Most SC insurances don’t cover our specialty anyway. However, we want to help our patients try to get reimbursement if they possibly can. We provide a complimentary service where we will submit for potential reimbursement on your behalf via a program called Reimbursify. That way if you do have coverage, we can help get reimbursement for you. Everything we do falls under medical, not vision insurance.
4. We have more options to help.
We have a lot of tools in our tool belt to help people! The good news about what we do is that it is usually correctable. It’s not a diagnosis you have to live with for the rest of your life- if we find a functional vision problem, we can make it better. Each person is unique and vision is complex, so we can suggest the best solution for you once we know the problem.
In general, we can use specialty lenses like prism, overnight contact lenses, at-home programs, in-office vision therapy, or a combination to help the eyes work better for you, not against you.
5. One size does not fit all here.
Every patient has a unique situation, so we don’t have any cookie cutter solutions. Everything is tailored to you at our eye clinic. You’ll receive a personalized experience because a myopia patient needs something different from a visual skills patient, and they need something different from a strabismus patient.
If you are looking for an intelligent doctor with a caring staff to go to bat for you- Brighter Outlook Vision is here for you.
We look forward to seeing you at our Charleston eye clinic and helping make you or your loved one’s vision better for life!
