The level of innovation in recent years with regard to soft contact lens manufacturing and materials science is staggering; consider the sophistication and enhanced wettability of the materials themselves as well as the level of reproducibility to the point that we have many daily disposable soft contact lenses in a variety of designs on the market. In terms of soft multifocal contact lenses, most of the product offerings historically have been in the two-week and monthly replacement categories. This left patients desiring soft multifocal daily disposable contact lenses with limited lens choices. Practitioners fitting such patients were often left with prescribing single-vision distance daily disposables, either with reading glasses or as monovision.

The Learning Curve of Increasing Availability

Fast forward to today, many of the new introductions in recent years into the soft contact lens market have been daily disposable multifocal designs. This has opened up many more options for presbyopic patients in terms of soft lens material options and in terms of multifocal contact lens designs and parameter ranges in a daily disposable replacement schedule.

As each new multifocal lens enters the marketplace, practitioners are tasked with familiarizing themselves with the new fitting guide, which can initially be a daunting task. But because novel designs are produced by manufacturers to improve on previous technology, the result is often a superior visual experience for patients.

Other manufacturers, when they develop new multifocal daily disposable lenses, use the same or similar multifocal optical designs to those in their two-week and monthly replacement contact lenses; this simplifies the learning curve for practitioners who are already familiar with those companies’ fitting guides and philosophies. This is also a wonderful benefit to patients who are already wearing the frequent replacement lens, as they can potentially move from one of the two-week or monthly replacement multifocal options into the corresponding daily disposable multifocal without the need to adapt to a new multifocal design. These patients will gain all of the benefits that daily disposable lenses provide without having their visual experience interrupted.

Expanding Opportunity

The power ranges of soft multifocal daily disposable contact lenses are ever expanding; at the time of this writing, sphere powers in these lens designs range from +6.00D to –12.00D. Several companies offer a range of add powers to optimize the near visual experience for patients.

Daily disposable lenses are an excellent choice for full-time everyday wear, but they also offer so much to those patients who have active lifestyles or who are interested in part-time wear. In addition, daily disposable lenses offer an opportunity for those patients who have dropped out of contact lenses another opportunity for success. For the presbyopic patients in the care of today’s modern eyecare practitioner, there are so many wonderful daily disposable multifocal contact lens options to explore and to offer in an effort to solve the visual challenges that presbyopia presents. CLS