InfantSEE®: A new approach to provide comprehensive vision assessments to infants in a public health program

Data collected by the American Optometric Association (AOA) via 10,000 InfantSEE® assessments conducted during 2006 and 2007, indicated the overall need for vision concern has increased from one in 14 in 2005 to one in nine in 2007. This finding reveals a growing need for early vision examination in infants. The data also identified groups at greatest risk for abnormal status.

Through InfantSEE®, optometrists provide a one-time, comprehensive eye and vision assessment to infants in their first year of life, between the ages of 6 and 12 months, offering early detection of potential eye and vision problems at no cost regardless of income or ability to pay.

InfantSEE® addresses the ways in which social networking was used to reach diverse populations in an effort to reduce health disparities. The project seeks to further determine the most efficient and impactful modes of transmission of public health education and health promotion materials into a targeted market regardless of barriers that may exist. Through this early-intervention health education and promotion program, the primary goal is to provide care to diverse populations and secondly to reduce the potential health expenditures that could be encountered due to undetected visual disorders.

Utilizing various social marketing tools to address health education and promotion, the goal of the InfantSEE® program was to gain further knowledge about what means the public uses to take advantage of a collaborative program such as InfantSEE® while at the same time providing needed vision assessments to ensure healthy vision development in the infant.