Faculty and staff whose to-do lists include items like "schedule an eye exam" or "get new glasses" can look forward to taking care of these tasks on campus when a new full-service optometry center opens summer 2014 at Ackerman Student Union.
 
The enterprise will be operated by the Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center, led by a management team with an eye toward expanding its optometry center — which currently serves students only —  to also cater to faculty and staff. By growing a customer base of students covered by the UC Student Health Insurance Plan and faculty and staff covered by UC’s Vision Service Plan (VSP), the business will create new income for the Ashe Center, which is experiencing the same kinds of budgetary challenges being felt campuswide.
 
Dr. Karen Leung and one other optometrist at the Ashe center perform thousands of eye exams every year.
"Instead of having to increase costs to students in order to meet our budget demands, we’re hoping that this entrepreneurial endeavor is going to provide a new funding stream that will be able to keep prices low," said John Bollard, chief administrative officer at the Ashe center. Currently, students pay nothing out-of-pocket for a general office visit at Ashe, which sees about 400 students a day. Bollard came up with the idea for the new eye care center about three years ago and brought others onboard to bring it to fruition.
 
According to the current schedule, in a few months the UCLA Store will move its greeting cards and gift items to make way for a 1,500-square-foot space that ASUCLA will rent to the Ashe center. In January, 2014, Facilities Management will begin construction of a glassed-in optometry center designed by campus architects, with completion by summer 2014. Estimated construction costs of about $300,000 will be paid not from student registration fees, but from reserve funds the Ashe center has saved from other sources.
 
The new center will be more than double the size of Ashe’s current 600-square-foot optometry center, which now shares a space with the health center’s busy pharmacy. The current inventory of about 400 styles of eyeglass frames will expand to about 1,000, priced from $50 to $250, along with a wide selection of sunglasses and contact lenses. UC’s student health insurance plan pays up to $120 per year towards the purchase of frames or contact lenses.
 
John Bollard, chief administrative officer at the Ashe center, came up with the idea of extending the  optometry center's services to faculty and staff.
Staff will expand from two optometrists to four. Currently, their schedules are so packed — they perform about 11,000 eye exams a year — that students must wait as long as six weeks to be seen. The new center, Bollard said, "will hopefully do away with waits," or at least reduce them to two or three days. "The ‘wait piece’ is very important," he explained, because long waits discourage students from getting exams in the first place.
 
"Eye exams are an important aspect of health care," said Bollard. With a co-pay of $10, these exams are fully covered by UC’s student health insurance, which 20,000 of UCLA’s 32,000 undergraduate and graduate students have. "Yet," Bollard noted, "as few as 20 percent of those students use their annual benefit for an eye exam. We’re hoping that by expanding, we’ll increase the number of students who take advantage of this insurance they already have."
 
Faculty and staff will find the new center very affordable, "because our whole model is nonprofit," said Bollard. "We won’t have the kind of markups charged by other stores."
 
And insurance reimbursement will be easy.
 
"They will be able to get an eye exam and purchase glasses, and we’ll bill VSP directly," Bollard said. Faculty and staff, as well as their dependents, can also have their prescriptions for eyewear or contacts obtained from outside the campus filled there.
 
However, because services to students will remain the optometry center’s first priority, the new center will only offer eye exams to active UCLA employees.
 
ASUCLA anticipates benefiting from the new store as well.
 
"The Ashe center will be able to provide expanded service to the campus, and ASUCLA will benefit from some rental income that can go toward other projects," said executive director Bob Williams. "ASUCLA is always looking for ways to add services that students, staff and faculty are looking for … ways to make the Student Union the center of campus life … We see this as a win-win situation."
 
For the Ashe center, moving from a health center model to a retail store "is one of the most interesting parts of this," said Bollard. "And I really think it’s going to be the future for a lot of departments at UCLA in these budget times. We’re all asking ourselves, ‘How can we be innovative and a little bit entrepreneurial?"