It seems to happen all too often. Pick up the phone in the office, and it’s a contact lens prescription verification request that may need to be replayed more than once to be understood. The Health Care Alliance for Patient Safety notes, “Confirming the accuracy of contact lens prescriptions, which includes several specifications, is far too complicated for an automated phone system or robocall. Information relayed in these robocalls is oftentimes garbled or does not align with a patient’s medical record—making it difficult, or even impossible, for a doctor to correctly identify the patient and proper prescription within the eight-hour passive verification window.” This message from Johnson & Johnson Vision Care sends a glimmer of hope to eliminate this problem, but only if we all take action.

Light, or visible light, is but a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes can detect. The visible light spectrum consists of wavelengths of light (from shortest to longest) violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and travels from the sun at 186,000/miles per second before it strikes an object. Depending on the object it strikes, it will either absorb, reflect, or refract the light. As an example, let's use a red apple. When sunlight, or white light, strikes the apple, the component colors are broken down and all the wavelengths of light are absorbed with the exception of the red wavelengths; they are being reflected. As our eyes process this information and fine-tune this data, our brain interprets this, and we see that all the colors except red are absorbed by the apple. The red wavelength is reflected, and therefore the apple appears red.