New Visionhealth location to allow for quicker visits, more services

Visionhealth Eye Center in Republic will be moving to a new, larger building next month. The eye care clinic will move from its current location at 612 E. Elm to its new location at 970 N. Oakwood, currently under construction. The move is expected to take place in mid-January.
Dr. Justin Hart, the owner of Visionhealth, said with an increasing number of patients at the practice made the new location necessary.
“(With) the growth of our practice, we just needed a few things to be able to continue growing and make it more streamlined for our patients,” he said.
 The new building, Hart said, will be 1,300 square feet larger than Visionhealth’s current location and have two additional exam rooms and “some preliminary exam rooms.” This will allow the outfit to increase the number of patients they see on a daily basis while still maintaining COVID-19 safeguard protocols, such as social distancing.
“In the short term, one of the issues we ran into was making sure we keep everyone distanced with all of the COVID-19 precautions,” he said. “We had to redo scheduling, and so as soon as we get into the building, we’ll be able to see more of our normal flow, because we can keep patients in rooms; we can keep them more spaced. In the long term, that allows us to be more efficient, get more patients back into the room quicker and reduce wait time for them, and just giving them a better experience.”
Hart added that by increasing the number of patients they can see each day, patients will not have to book their appointments as far in the future as they do now.
“The issue we have right now is due to our volume of booking,” he said. “We have patients booked out quite a way, and the immediate benefit will be … people won’t have to wait so long for an appointment.”
More parking, expanded showroom
The new building will also feature more parking and an expanded optical showroom where customers can pick out frames they want for their glasses, Hart said.
“Parking has been an issue for us,” he said, “so we made a bigger parking lot that wraps all the way around the building; patients have an easier time getting in the building, and just a larger optical showroom, again reducing crowding and just a more streamlined floor plan. Since we were able to design this from the ground up, we were able to design it exactly the way we wanted the flow, and that way, it makes things more efficient for us and for our patients.”
Hart said the public is welcome to view the new building when Visionhealth’s move there is complete.
“We’re excited for it,” he said. “We invite everybody to stop by once we get it done. There are some things on the outside and the inside I would love to be able to show people as soon as we get it up and open.”