Unprecedented. Overwhelming. Unexpected. Confusing. Scary.

The current COVID-19 crisis has brought on a tidal wave of uncertainty to us all. Sometimes it’s difficult to admit that we actually feel overwhelmed on so many levels—personal, social and business—but there’s nothing wrong with admitting it.

That said, the crisis is also challenging each of us, our employees, managers and businesses to be creative, resourceful and strong to help our families, our colleagues and our industry to find positive ways to move forward during these difficult times. We know how crucial it is for everyone in our industry to work together to find our way out of this crisis.

In particular, the feedback we have received from you, our readers, is that you are hungry for information, direction, resources and education—in sum, contact with your colleagues and your suppliers in just about any form. As you may already be aware, Jobson has launched a new twice-weekly e-newsletter, COVID-19 Ophthalmic News Roundup, and has conducted five waves of our Coronavirus Research ECP survey. The News Roundup is bringing together highlights of coverage issued digitally from all of our respected platforms. The 20/20 team has launched a new weekly COVID-19 Optical Online Events Newsletter, where we are gathering a wide variety of online programs aimed at your information and planning needs. And finally, the Jobson Research team has launched a new weekly COVID-19 ECP Performance Tracker, which will provide a series of optical business metrics for the U.S. market to determine the trajectory of the COVID business downturn, monitor its duration and uncover which regions of the country will begin heading in a positive direction as the COVID crisis abates. In particular, I want to thank GPN, ABB Analyze and The Vision Council for their leadership in sharing critically important data for this performance newsletter.

As we all look for ways to bolster the eyecare community during this time of crisis, I encourage you to reach out to me or other Jobson team members to review all the ways we can work together to keep the market informed and to strengthen the bonds of the eyecare community that have been threatened by the COVID-19 crisis. We stand ready to collaborate with the ECP community—and the industry overall—to bring useful and actionable information, resources and data for the industry community at large.

I’m confident we can meet this crisis head-on and keep our community informed and educated using a wide variety of tools at our collective disposal. Let’s work together to move the market forward.

Marc Ferrara
CEO, Information Services Group
Jobson Medical Information
[email protected]