Sight Savers America: Share the Vision

Every day, a child living somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi is given the chance to see with his or her best possible vision, thanks to the work of Sight Savers America. The non-profit, pediatric vision health organization offers free services to children who can’t afford eye care or who have no access to doctors or other professionals. Very simply, Sight Savers helps children see better. This is our mission. This is our goal. This is what we do successfully. The numbers of children we touch and the lives we change continue to grow each year, now topping more than 100,000 since the organization began ten years ago. Sight Savers believes neither poverty, lack of access to eye doctors, apathy, or any other obstacle, should stand as barriers to all children attaining their best vision possible. Eye examinations, eyeglasses, transportation, surgery, and training and delivery of costly vision aids for children who have severe vision impairment are some of Sight Savers services. These services, combined with a unique case management protocol aimed at personal care for every child, has prompted industry leaders to call Sight Savers America the national model for childhood eye care. Over 90 percent of all Alabama and Mississippi children who fail vision screenings in day cares, Head Start programs, and public schools are referred to Sight Savers for its unique Follow-Up Eye Care plan. Once the referrals are received, a Sight Savers Personal Case Specialist goes to work to do whatever is necessary to make sure their assigned children get the care they need. Eighteen case specialists make up to two thousand phone calls each week to children’s parents, school nurses, eye doctors’ offices, transportation agencies, optical shops, eye clinics and other organizations to case manage each child’s eye care. Utilizing the CRM database case, specialists complete a needs assessment for every child referred and then track the progress of each child’s eye care. Extensive records are kept on each child’s progress. Records are maintained in an extensive database from which the staff can peruse the medical records for use in patient care. The database records are also used to construct reports for funders, the media, and others such as elected officials who, for example, might want to know how many children have been served in their districts. In the summer of 2008, Sight Savers purchased from TechSoup the components necessary to implement our CRM 4.0 upgrade which greatly expanded the productivity of our database. The additional CAL’s enabled our expanding organization to increase from 10 to 30 licenses, allowing eight additional case specialists to provide eye care to fifteen thousand additional children each year. The 4.0 upgrade increased the data processing speed and activated multiple new functions of CRM. For example, each case specialist now receives an automatic list of daily priorities and reminders. Additionally, email discussions of specific patients can be attached directly to the patient’s record so that all case specialists have access to the full details of each child’s care. One of the most important improvements is the "advanced find" data query enhancements that make it possible for us to research our expanding client base to increase productivity and target services to children in need. The upgrade took us from a labor-intensive data export to a single-template query that provides information in just a few seconds. This is a huge benefit to patient care, the reporting process, grant proposals, results, grantors, and others. Case specialists report that the number of calls they now make in one day has doubled with the new software. More calls result in more children getting on the road to better vision much sooner than they could have done before the upgrades. With the help of TechSoup, Sight Savers spent $2550 for software worth $64,119 which enabled them to upgrade to CRM 4.0 But, the real worth of this software can’t be measured by the bottom line. In a recent phone call from the Mom of a nine year old boy who was sporting a brand new free pair of glasses after having been diagnosed with refractive errors she said, “I thought my son was depressed. He seemed so unhappy and I had no idea what was wrong. But, now that he has his glasses, he’s dancing around and so happy that he can see clearly. It has truly been a life changing experience. “