Piedmont Athens Regional is now providing eye care to residents in the Athens area, whether they have insurance or not.
The hospital’s Community Care Clinic has opened an Eye Clinic on Prince Avenue. Cindy Carmean is the director of operations for the community care clinic.
“We are very happy in combination with our residency clinic and Dr.[Jing] Dong, who is a community ophthalmologist, we are able to provide eye screenings and prescriptions for patients that are otherwise not able to have access to those,” according to Carmean.
Patients seen in the Eye Clinic can receive basic eye screenings, prescriptions for corrective lenses, and treatment common eye conditions, provided by resident physicians under the supervision of local ophthalmologist Jing Dong, M.D.
The Community Care Clinic offers regular check-up visits for adults, sick visits, immunizations/vaccinations and management of chronic illnesses.
“Primarily we’re trying to target patients that have diabetes, just because of the correlation between diabetes and eye dysfunction; and making sure that those patients are being screen appropriately. What we find is patients who don’t have insurance typically aren’t getting those things.”
All patients can be seen, those with or without insurance, the under-insured, and those on Medicaid or Medicare.
“We have the benefit of serving as the primary training location for our residency program and so we’re able to staff this clinic with our residents who are in training but they are under supervision of attending physicians," Carmean said. "In that setting we are able to offer primary care and internal medicine.”
The Eye Clinic will be open the second Friday of every month and is located within the Community Care Clinic at 1270 Prince Ave., Suite 101 in Athens. For more information about the Community Care Clinic, visit piedmont.org/CommunityCareClinic.
The Community Care Clinic opened in May 2016.
The Eye Clinic is the newest addition to the Community Care Clinic’s specialty services offered, which also include endocrinology, pulmonology, nephrology, hematology and, oncology, infectious disease, and geriatric services.
