Our Story

Dr. Mark Page's father lost vision. Watching that happen, and watching how much of ordinary life narrows when sight goes, is what put Dr. Page into optometry and what he built this practice around.

The lesson he took from it was not sentimental. It was technical. A great deal of vision loss is preventable or treatable if it is found early enough, and the reason it is not found early enough is usually that nobody looked properly. Glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration are all silent in their early stages. They do not hurt. They do not blur. They simply progress while a person feels entirely fine.

So when he opened Arizona's Vision in 1994, the founding decision was to invest in diagnostic technology beyond what a small practice would normally carry, and to structure the schedule so there was actually time to use it.

Ahwatukee was a very different place then. Much of the Foothills was still open desert, the Towne Center had not been built, and the community was small enough that a new practice lived or died on word of mouth within a few square miles.

That turned out to be the right environment for how Dr. Page wanted to work. In a neighbourhood bounded by a mountain on one side and a freeway on the other, reputation travels fast and there is nowhere to hide from a bad appointment. Building slowly on referrals from neighbours produced a practice that could never afford to rush anyone.

We schedule 2 patients an hour. High-volume optical chains typically schedule four to six. That difference is roughly two thirds of the potential revenue per chair, and it is the single most expensive decision this practice makes.

It is also the one that determines everything else. Binocular vision testing, a careful retinal examination, and an actual conversation about what we found all take time, and they are the first things to disappear when a schedule is full. Thirty years in, we have never found a good argument for changing it.

The practice grew, but not in the direction most growing practices go. We did not open second and third locations. We added doctors with genuinely different clinical strengths and kept everyone in one building.

Dr. Hao Nguyen brought ocular disease and low vision expertise, along with Vietnamese fluency that matters a great deal to families in the East Valley who had been navigating medical appointments through relatives acting as interpreters. Dr. Callie Sincennes brought corneal and surgical co-management training from a combined OD/MD practice, a community health centre and a Veterans Affairs clinic.

The value of keeping them in one place is continuity. The doctor who diagnosed your condition is the doctor monitoring it. In specialty contact lens work in particular, that continuity is most of the product.

Dr. Page wrote The Smart Parents Guide: How To Help Your Child See a Better Life because the same conversation kept happening in the exam room and fifteen minutes was never enough for it.

Parents would arrive with a child whose prescription had increased for the third year running, having been told, correctly, that this was normal. Normal is true. Harmless is not, because childhood myopia progression determines an adult eye's lifetime risk of retinal detachment, glaucoma and macular problems. And it is now treatable, which was not the case a generation ago.

The book exists because that gap between what parents are told and what parents need to know was too wide to close one appointment at a time.

The technology is unrecognisable from 1994. We image the retina now rather than only examining it, which means a lesion that has been stable for six years can be distinguished from one that has grown. Corneal topography maps a cornea in detail that was not available to a small practice three decades ago. Specialty lens design is computed rather than approximated.

Treatment has changed too, and in one area dramatically. Childhood myopia was something you corrected and accepted. It is now something you can slow, which changes the adult eye a child ends up with. Keratoconus meant a corneal transplant for many patients. Cross-linking changed that outcome for most of them.

What has not changed is the schedule, the ownership, and the address. Two patients an hour, doctor-owned, one building. Those three things have been constant through every technological shift, and they are the reasons the technology gets used properly rather than sold as an add-on.

We are still at 15215 S 48th St Ste 180, in the same building, with the same schedule. We have cared for more than 50,000+ patients, and a good number of the children we fitted with their first pair of glasses now bring their own children through the same door.

The technology has changed considerably. We image the retina now rather than only examining it, which means we can compare this year against five years ago instead of relying on memory. That is exactly the capability Dr. Page wanted in 1994 and could not yet buy.

What has not changed is the reason. Vision loss that gets caught early is usually manageable. Vision loss that gets caught late frequently is not. Everything else here is downstream of that.