The staff meeting where this script was born started with a complaint. The team at Dr. Brianna Rhue’s South Florida practice was fielding the same request over and over: patients walking out with their prescriptions and asking for a copy of their PD on the way. The staff proposal was simple. "Dr. Rhue, we’d like to start charging for this."
She said no. Not because the frustration was wrong, but because a fee punishes the patient without fixing the conversation. What the practice changed instead was the language, and she walked through the whole playbook on a Techifeye webinar episode.1
Context matters here. Her practice sits in one of the densest eye care markets in the country, by her count surrounded by hundreds of optometrists and wedged between warehouse clubs and online optical. If a script can hold a glasses sale in that environment, it earns a look from practices with far less competition on the block.
We covered why the PD request means the sale is already in trouble in an earlier piece. This one is about what her team actually says, line by line, and why each line works.
The script itself
When a patient asks for their prescription and wants their PD taken, the team responds with this:
"We would be happy to take that measurement. However, wherever you get your glasses, that is done by a skilled optician who’s going to get the measurement for those spectacles that you choose."
Eight words of yes, then a real reason to stay. Notice what the script never does. There is no refusal, so no standoff develops at the front desk and no one-star review starts brewing in the parking lot. The patient gets no lecture about online retailers, and the PD is never framed as something the practice is withholding.
What it does instead is relocate the measurement. The PD stops being a number the patient owns and starts being a fitting step that belongs with whichever optician sells the glasses. That framing holds because it is accurate.
The clinical backbone: a wearing PD is not a number on a card
The reason the script survives pushback is that the measurement really is frame-specific. A pupilometer takes an anatomical PD, the fixed distance between your pupils. The measurement that determines whether a progressive lens performs is the wearing PD: where each eye sits relative to the specific frame, as it actually rests on that patient’s face. Change the frame and the measurement changes with it.
The licensed opticians on the episode offered the comparison that makes it click for patients. Nobody asks to walk out with their seg heights, because everyone understands seg height depends on the frame you choose. Position-of-wear measurements work the same way. Explained that way, the patient is not being denied a number. They are being told the number does not exist yet, because no frame has been chosen.
One caution before you borrow the policy wholesale: prescription release rules vary by state. Dr. Rhue noted that Florida does not require the PD on a released prescription, which is what gives her script room to operate. Check your own state’s requirements before you build your version.
The $70 safety valve
The second piece of the playbook handles the patient who buys elsewhere anyway and comes back unhappy. Her practice offers a re-check: bring in the glasses, and for a $70 fee the team will verify the prescription and the measurements, with a return visit to the doctor if something is genuinely off.
The fee does quiet work. It respects the patient’s choice instead of shaming it, so the relationship survives the online purchase, and it prices the practice’s expertise instead of giving it away as cleanup labor. Most usefully, it changes the math at the moment of decision: the patient comparing an online price to your price now has to add $70 of risk to the cheap option. Dr. Rhue’s read is that the policy has saved sales outright: once patients understand the practice is measuring far more than a PD, some of them put the credit card away and sit back down.
The handoff that gets them to sit down
The third piece is the line she considers the real closer, and it is a question rather than a statement:
"Do you mind if we sit down with my licensed optician to take some measurements for you and go over the coverage and the discounts that you have to maximize those?"
Her word for what this does is "de-arming." A patient asking for their PD is braced for a no. A question that opens with "do you mind" almost always gets a yes, because it offers help instead of resistance, and it names two things the patient actively wants: their coverage and their discounts, maximized. The patient who sits down with an optician is back inside the practice’s process, and the conversation about frames and lenses gets to happen after all.
Readers who have been with us a while will recognize the shape. It is the same calibrated-question pattern we broke down in "if I may ask, in the past...", and the contact lens version of this exact handoff is the 30-second script for the patient who asks to take their CL prescription and go. Different counter, same psychology: lower the defenses, keep the patient in the room, let the value do the selling.
Scripts only work if you practice them
The part of the episode worth taping to the break room wall is her warning about rehearsal. "You have to practice this language," she said, because the PD conversation is an awkward one and awkward conversations go badly when improvised. The staff member who has never said the script out loud will deliver it with an edge, and patients hear the edge before they hear the words.
Her broader rule applies: a request you hear over and over is a process problem, and process problems get solved with repetition, not memos. The practices that make this work treat the script like a clinical skill. It gets demonstrated and role-played, the same way you would train a new pre-tester on an instrument.
Here is the one thing to do this week. Print the script and the handoff question on a card for every dispensing station. Then spend ten minutes at your next team meeting role-playing the ask, with one person playing the patient who is already halfway out the door. The first run will be clumsy. That is the point of doing it in the break room instead of at the front desk.
A note from the DCL team
What we like about this spotlight is that the fix cost nothing. There was no new equipment and no policy war with patients. One practice in a brutal market looked at its most repeated, most uncomfortable request and changed what the team says.
That is the discipline we care about on the contact lens side too, where the "can I just get my prescription?" moment decides a year of supply revenue. If you want help finding which moment in your patient experience deserves this next, that is a conversation we have with practices every week.
Sources
- Techifeye webinar, "Put Away Your Sharpie," hosted by Dr. Brianna Rhue with two licensed opticians as guests. All quotes and practice details in this article are verbatim from the episode recording, and the full playbook is presented exactly as Dr. Rhue described it. Watch the recording (passcode: Yi@^8Yz4).