Patients arriving at the new Dr. Robert C. Bauman & Associates optometry office will notice immediately that it’s a high-tech operation.
Outside, five massive solar panels provide most of the practice’s electricity.
Inside, a complicated instrument can take an interior photograph of a patient’s eyes to check for diseases such as glaucoma and macular degeneration.
Dr. Robert C Bauman opened his Stowe practice five years ago; he provides eye exams and emergency eye care along with Dr. Shannon H. Mitchell, who joined the business last year.
They moved from South Main Street to a newly constructed, energy-efficient building on Route 100 South last week. They built the new headquarters to accommodate an expanding list of patients and upgrade the equipment.
Bauman bought an office building that had a series of tenants, including the HMC2 advertising agency, tore down all but a historic Cape Cod-style house, and started over.
“We really pulled out all the stops,” Bauman said. “We offer A-to-Z eye care, everything from glaucoma screenings to same-day eyeglasses. I did it as a thank you to the community for their support. Their support has been overwhelming.”
Bauman, 59, lives in Stowe with his wife and two children. He was educated at the State University of New York and later attended the university’s school of optometry in Manhattan.
He ran a practice with 58 employees in Waterbury, Conn., for 26 years before moving to Vermont.
He’s made a huge investment in high-tech equipment — the machines he uses for his eye exams cost between $30,000 and $90,000.
“It doesn’t make sense from a dollars-and-cents point of view, but it makes sense from a quality-of-care point of view,” Bauman said.
Take, for instance, an instrument that replaces the eye charts and one-eye blinders historically used to determine an eyewear prescription. Now, the patient simply glances into a window, and the instrument calculates a precise prescription.
“The instrument analyzes the vision and tells us the exact correction needed without any guessing,” Bauman said. “With young children and patients with Alzheimer’s, we know their vision without asking additional questions.”
Early detection is critical for treating diseases such as glaucoma and cataracts. Bauman can detect these and other eye problems early with an instrument that produces a detailed image of the inside of the eye. It’s a standard component of all of his eye exams.
“It takes only five seconds to look, using a laser light and no radiation,” Bauman said.
Some of his equipment isn’t available anywhere else in Vermont. In fact, many of the instruments are typically seen only at large optometry practices in New York, Boston and other major cities.
Each instrument used during an exam produces a detailed readout of the eye and shares that information with other instruments.
In the end, all the information compiled by the instruments feeds into a database, which assembles a narrative eye report for each patient, detailing the condition of the eyes and what care they should get.
An expansive eyewear showroom offers the “largest selection of eyeglasses in Vermont and one of the largest in the Northeast,” Bauman said. Display cases hold hundreds of selections, including Eco, a line of frames made from recycled materials, and designer frames from Gucci, Lacoste and Fendi, among others.
Patients can stand in front of a machine — one of the first in the U.S. — and have photographs taken of themselves with prospective frames. The machine also helps the on-site optician determine exactly how to cut their bifocal and no-line bifocal lenses, based on their facial measurements.
Patients don’t need to wait long to receive their new eyeglasses. Most can be created on-site within 24 hours. Additionally, contact lenses are available for most vision-correction prescriptions.
Bauman wanted to create an environmentally-friendly building when he constructed his new office. Contractors used energy-efficient insulation and other construction materials.
The solar panels on pedestals outside the building supply 70 percent of his electricity during the summer and 80 percent during the winter, when the air-conditioning system is not in use.
In an alternative-energy wrinkle, solar panels are exempt from local zoning review if the state issues a certificate of public good to a business with solar panels which are net-metered — that is, they put any unused energy back into the local utility grid.
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Dr. Bauman & Associates is at 1248 Waterbury Road. Information: www.drrobertbauman.com.
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