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New emergency eye care facility opens in Missoula

Posted at 10:57 AM, Jun 10, 2019
and last updated 2019-06-10 12:58:44-04

MISSOULA – The Rocky Mountain Eye Center in Missoula is now providing 24-hour emergency urgent care for any optical medical emergency.

People with an eye care emergency in the past have had to go to an Emergency Room, and in most cases would end up getting referred to a specialist anyway.

The new urgent care facility will speed up the process since the center has a variety of specialists and resources under one roof. It’s a resource that’s still somewhat unknown in the community that could save someone time, money and medical resources.

“Being able to just provide the service to the community — not only our patients that we see. A lot of our patients already know they can just come in. Most of them don’t realize that they can just walk in,” Rocky Mountain Eye Center Director of Optometry Dan Larsen said.

“A lot of them will come in with a phone call and get an appointment, but also other members of the community that aren’t our patients do tend to go to the emergency room…where then they get billed twice,” he continued. “Now they are getting two bills instead of one. So its not only a loss of resources but also a loss of time from that standpoint.

That emergency care could be billed to medical insurance – so even if people don’t have any eye coverage they could still use the new facility.