The only reason I stopped wearing contacts was because I was too lazy to renew my prescription. Stores have strict rules about only selling to you if your prescription is valid, and most are only valid for two years. But now there are online tools that let you renew your contact lens prescription from home.
Simple Contacts is a free new app that lets you take a rudimentary eye exam through your iPhone. It doesn’t analyze the refractive error of your eye or anything like that, nor is it a substitute for a full eye exam. The sole purpose of this app is to easily renew an existing prescription that you’re confident still works. (You need to have had a full eye exam in the past four years to use the service.) As such, this is for people with healthy, low-risk eyes.
I recently tried it out myself. It works pretty much like you’d expect: the app literally shows you an eye chart and asks you to read the letters aloud, like any typical eye exam, and records you doing so. The test is then sent to a doctor to review. Of course, it would be silly to read a phone that’s right in front of you. You’re required to stand ten feet away from your phone when you take the test; if you aren’t far enough, you’ll be asked to take the test again. (It’s a little unnerving to send a video of yourself out into the unknown, but they say it’s stored in an HIPAA compliant system like any medical data.) And that’s basically it. A doctor will review the test and your contacts will be shipped within about a week.
There are a few minor caveats. You can’t take the test without also buying contacts—you take the exam and place an order all at once—and there is a $10 physician fee for the prescription. It’s currently limited to 20 states, but they’ll be expanding to new regions, of course.
Joel Wish, the founder of Simple Contacts, tells me that there are a variety of features currently in the pipeline. Right now you can’t use the app to order contacts if you already have a valid prescription. You can if you just email them, though, and indeed I found their customer service to be very nice and responsive. That feature will be added soon. Eventually they might also let you renew your prescription (for a fee) without ordering anything. There’s also an Android version in development, of course.
Simple Contacts isn’t the only service that offers renewed prescriptions online. There’s also Opternative, which offers glasses or contacts prescriptions for $40. I haven’t tried it myself but their exam is actually more thorough and uses both your webcam and a phone app. They can actually determine your prescription from scratch, rather than renewing an old script. But if all you need is to re-up your current lenses with a recently lapsed prescription, Simple Contacts gets the job done.
Simple Contacts | iTunes App Store
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