MD/OD ophthalmology practices operate under a scheduling model that most people outside the specialty underestimate. A single group can see patients for routine comprehensive eye exams, contact lens fittings, pre-operative surgical consultations, post-op follow-ups, medical eye exams, retinal evaluations, and urgent care visits, all under one roof with providers who have very different scopes of practice. ODs handle the primary care volume. MDs handle the surgical cases. Both see emergency patients. The front desk has to know the difference every time the phone rings.
Add insurance complexity on top of that (vision plans and medical plans are separate, and many patients carry both), along with multi-location coordination and provider-specific scheduling rules, and you've got a front office problem that hiring alone won't solve.
Grin Eye Care knows this firsthand and they've become a proof point for what AI can do in one of healthcare's most scheduling-complex specialties.
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When Call Volume Outpaces Your Front Desk
Grin Eye Care delivers comprehensive ophthalmology services across 3 locations in the Kansas City metro with 14 providers. The practice covers everything from routine eye exams and contact lens care to cataract surgery and treatment for conditions like keratoconus. It's a high-volume operation with a wide range of visit types, and the front desk teams were feeling every bit of that complexity.
The math was hard to ignore. Industry data puts the average dropped call rate for medical practices at 23%. For a practice handling hundreds of inbound calls a week, that translates to a significant number of patients who dial in, wait, and hang up before ever reaching a scheduler. Some of those patients try again. A lot of them don't.
John Burrows, CEO of Grin Eye Care, had seen it play out in patient reviews. Patients reporting multiple failed attempts to get through. Calls picked up and then dropped. Hold times that made patients feel like the practice didn't value their time, even when the reality was that the staff was simply overwhelmed.
"A lot of the reviews that I see of us and others are, 'I tried to call in three times. No one picked up.' That's what this solves, in my opinion."
The scheduling team was spending most of their day fielding routine calls for comprehensive eye exams and follow-ups. That left less bandwidth for the patient interactions that actually required human judgment, things like surgical scheduling coordination, specialty contact lens consultations, and in-office patient support.
Why MD/OD Scheduling Breaks Most Automation Tools
Before getting into what changed, it's worth understanding why MD/OD scheduling is harder to automate than it looks.
In an MD/OD practice, the scheduling logic splits along provider type. ODs see the bulk of the routine volume: annual comprehensive exams, contact lens exams and fittings, medical eye exams for conditions like dry eye or allergies. MDs handle surgical consultations, post-operative care, and complex medical cases. Some visit types can go to either provider type depending on availability and clinical need. Others are strictly limited to a specific provider.
Then there's insurance. Unlike most specialties, eye care practices regularly collect both a vision plan and a medical plan from the same patient. A routine eye exam bills to vision insurance. A medical eye exam for glaucoma or cataracts bills to medical. The front desk has to know which plan applies to which visit type. If the wrong one is collected, the claim gets denied and the patient gets a surprise bill. For practices that also fit specialty contact lenses, the insurance logic gets even more layered.
This is why generic scheduling portals and traditional patient engagement tools have struggled in ophthalmology. Without the intelligence to route patients to the right provider type, enforce appointment type rules, and collect the correct insurance information, staff end up correcting errors after the fact. The problem was never the concept of automated scheduling. It was the lack of specialty-specific logic behind it.
EliseAI has invested heavily in building for this complexity. Across ophthalmology, EliseAI handles the full range of MD/OD scheduling workflows, we’re actively building dual insurance collection, provider-type routing, and multi-location coordination. That depth of specialty knowledge is what separates a platform built for eye care from a generic tool adapted to it.
How EliseAI Integrates with ModMed for Ophthalmology Scheduling
EliseAI integrated directly with Grin Eye Care's ModMed EHR, handling appointment scheduling and patient inquiries across all 3 locations. There's no separate scheduling layer. Elise reads provider templates, appointment types, time blocks, and location assignments from the same source of truth the staff uses, and applies them in real time during every patient interaction.
When a provider updates their schedule in ModMed, Elise picks up the change automatically. No ticket to file. No configuration update to request. The scheduling logic stays current because it's pulling directly from the EHR. For a practice with 14 providers, including several part-time ODs and MDs with variable schedules, that kind of automatic sync is critical.
The implementation worked with Grin Eye Care's existing VoIP phone system without requiring any infrastructure changes. EliseAI sits behind the general scheduling option in the phone tree. When a patient calls to schedule, Elise handles the conversation end to end. When a call requires a human (a surgical coordination question, a specialty contact lens inquiry), it transfers seamlessly to the front desk. And after hours, Elise keeps working. Patients calling any of the three locations outside of business hours can still schedule, reschedule, or get answers without waiting until morning.
For practices evaluating AI scheduling vendors, this is an important distinction. EliseAI doesn't require a practice to rip out its phone system or change its EHR workflows. It plugs into the infrastructure that's already in place and starts handling calls within weeks.
"Elise doesn't call in sick. Elise doesn't have an attitude. Elise doesn't get grumpy. Elise is always pleasant," Burrows said. "And even when patients are cursing at her, Elise is very professional and essentially gets the job done."
AI Scheduling Results: 700+ Calls Handled Monthly Across 3 Locations
Since going live, Grin Eye Care has seen measurable results across all three locations:
700+ calls handled per month by EliseAI. Patients who previously sat on hold or went to voicemail now get through immediately, on the first ring.
200+ appointments scheduled per month without staff involvement. The routine scheduling volume that was consuming the front desk now runs without human intervention.
50 hours saved per month in front desk time, redirected from phone work to higher-value patient support, surgical coordination, and in-office care.
These are measured results from a live deployment, not projections. And for a practice that had no online scheduling option before EliseAI, the operational shift was substantial. Grin Eye Care went from a model where every appointment required a phone call and a human scheduler to one where the majority of routine scheduling runs on its own.
The impact extends beyond efficiency. Capturing calls that previously went unanswered has a direct revenue implication. Every missed call is a potential missed appointment. Every missed appointment is lost revenue and a patient who may go elsewhere. For an MD/OD practice with 14 providers, even a single-digit percentage improvement in appointment capture adds up quickly.
What Grin Eye Care Proves for MD/OD Ophthalmology Practices
Grin Eye Care's story matters for MD/OD groups evaluating whether AI can handle the nuance of eye care workflows. The pattern across ophthalmology practices is consistent: as groups add providers and locations, call complexity compounds faster than headcount can keep up. Hiring more schedulers introduces training bottlenecks, turnover risk, and inconsistency in how provider preferences and insurance rules are applied across locations.
EliseAI doesn't replace the scheduling team. It removes the ceiling on how many patients the practice can serve without proportionally scaling headcount. And because it integrates directly with ModMed and works within the practice's existing phone system, it went live in weeks, not months.
For MD/OD ophthalmology practices specifically, EliseAI brings a level of specialty depth that generic patient engagement platforms can't match. Dual insurance collection, provider-type routing, multi-location coordination, and deep EHR integration are not add-ons. They're built into the platform from the start. That's why leading MD/OD groups across the country are choosing EliseAI as their scheduling AI partner.
Burrows sees the partnership as part of a larger shift in how healthcare practices will operate going forward. "This is the first step across that threshold into AI in healthcare," he said. When asked if there was anything he would have done differently, his answer was direct: "The only regret I had is that I didn't do it sooner."