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Unlock The Definitive Guide to Better Comprehensive Eye Exams
Cut your testing time in half—while doing more testing, better doctor prep, and without compromising care. Based on the Carrot-Klein Method, developed by Dr. Steve Klein, Founder of 58-location clinic Total Vision.
- The seven rules of the method
- The 10-minute workup, mapped by role
- Four fillable worksheets
- Capacity calculator + 30-day plan
Read it online, or download the PDF and print the worksheets for your workup room.
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5M+
exams completed
2.5k+
clinics nationwide
15
validated tests
6x
average ROI
Why this matters
The waste never shows up on your schedule.
It's a question asked twice. A walk to a third room. A test that won't change today's plan. Individually none of it looks like a problem — which is exactly why it survives, year after year, in practices that are otherwise run beautifully. And it costs on four fronts at once.
Patients
Longer waits, repeated questions, and the sense of barely seeing the doctor.
Doctors
Minutes spent executing routine testing instead of interpreting it.
Staff
Improvised workflows and bottlenecks that compound across the day.
The practice
Capacity left on the table, and results that don't hold up across sites.
What the guide is built on
The 22-minute workup, rebuilt to 7 minutes.
That's the result Dr. Klein reported across Total Vision — and nothing was removed from the exam to get there. The testing was sequenced so it runs while the technician works. The guide shows you how to build the same thing in your own clinic.
Result achieved at Total Vision under Dr. Klein's workflow model. Individual practice results will vary.
What's inside
Three acts. One better workup.
It's built the way a clinic leader actually works a problem: understand where the time goes, see what a designed workup looks like, then build the plan. Every act ends with something you fill in.
01
Understand where your time actually goes
The exam start to finish, the eight friction points hiding inside it, and what “doctor-ready” really means — defined, not assumed.
Ends with: mapping your own workup, step by step
02
See the destination
The same ten minutes seen by role — who has the patient at every moment, what the objective testing block gathers, and how a baseline plus exceptions replaces testing everyone identically.
Ends with: baseline and clinical branches
03
Build your plan
The seven principles behind the method, a tear-out workflow audit, the math on your own exam volume, and a thirty-day sequence that starts tomorrow.
Ends with: six commitments and a review date
Not a white paper
It's built to be written in.
Most guides tell you what to think. This one makes you look at your own clinic and write down what you find. Read it once end to end, then run it with your team.
- Worksheet 01 — Map your workupEvery step, who performs it, where it happens, how long it takes, and whether the doctor repeats it later.
- Tear-out — The workflow auditPrint it, put it in the workup room, and walk one clinic day against it. Seven habits worth protecting, six patterns worth eliminating.
- The capacity calculatorRun your own exam volume through the arithmetic and see the hours you'd get back.
- The 30-day planMeasure, decide, pilot, adjust — one week at a time, starting with what you can do tomorrow.
From the Carrot-Klein Method
The same ten minutes, seen by role
Most workup maps only record what happens. The guide maps who has the patient at every moment — because the minutes are rarely lost inside a step. They're lost between them, in the handoffs nobody assigned.
Collect history & chief complaint
Verify history & complaint — don't rebuild it
Autorefraction & keratometry
Tonometry (IOP)
Retinal imaging
Visual acuity
Functional vision testing Carrot automates
Contrast sensitivity, pupillometry, ocular motility and visual field screening run as one unattended block — while the technician charts, preps and readies the handoff instead of standing over a test.
Doctor handoff — data already documented
The overlap is the point. Between minutes six and nine the technician and the platform are working at the same time. That single overlap is most of the difference between a 22-minute workup and a 7-minute one — not faster hands.
What you'll be able to do
Six things you can act on this month
1
See exactly where your minutes go. Eight friction points hiding inside a workup that looks efficient on paper — and the two that cost the most.
2
Cut testing time without cutting tests. The workflow that took one 58-location group from 22 minutes to 7, with nothing removed from the exam.
3
Get four objective tests in about three minutes — while your technician charts, preps and readies the handoff instead of running them.
4
End the handoff guesswork. A six-point standard that tells everyone — techs included — when a patient is genuinely ready for the doctor.
5
Run the same exam at every chair and every site — standardized, documented, and comparable against next year's results.
6
Put a number on what it's worth — run your own volume through the capacity calculator and see the hours.
Built on proven methodology
“The goal isn't to do less testing. It's to do better testing, faster.”
— Dr. Steve Klein, Founder, Total Vision
Dr. Klein and his wife, Dr. Kim Plattner, grew a single San Diego practice into a 58-location network with 100+ optometrists and 600+ staff — acquired by VSP Ventures in 2025. He led that growth hands-on: seeing patients, managing doctors, and hand-selecting the practices Total Vision acquired — while building the testing workflows that cut comprehensive exam time from roughly 22 minutes to as little as 7, without compromising clinical quality. This guide expands his method into a workbook, with clinical and product guidance from Carrot.
Who it's for
Written for the whole practice
Owners & operations leaders
How redesigning exam testing reclaims capacity and protects margins — without new rooms, staff or overhead.
Optometrists & ophthalmologists
How to standardize testing so every exam begins with complete, objective data already in the chart.
Practice administrators
How to build predictable schedules and ease staff stress with one repeatable workflow.
Technicians
The step-by-step workup — and how to run it the same way at every chair, every time.
What 10 minutes per workup is worth
10 hours
per provider, per week — at 60 exams
A full extra clinic day, per provider — without a new room, a new hire, or a longer schedule. The calculator inside runs your own numbers.
Beyond the time saved
Better testing, not less
The payoff isn't only speed. Delegating objective tests to an automated, repeatable workflow changes the quality of what the clinician gets to work with.
Standardized care, at any scale
Every provider, tech and location runs the same exam, so quality stays consistent as the practice grows.
A record, not a memory
Objective results captured the same way every visit build the baseline you'll want three years from now.
Empowered teams
The platform runs the testing, so technicians can reliably start exams that used to wait on a provider.
Patient-specific, not one-size-fits-all
A protocol sets the reliable baseline, then testing adapts to age, history, symptoms and risk.
Reclaim the minutes. Keep your standard of care.
The full guide, the worksheets, the audit, the calculator and the 30-day plan.
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About Carrot
More than a visual field analyzer.
Carrot is an AI-powered clinical testing platform that combines gold-standard visual field testing with automated comprehensive eye exam workflows — helping practices deliver faster, more consistent patient care from a single integrated platform. We invented VR perimetry in 2018, and more virtual visual exams have been run on Carrot than all competitors combined — over 60% of the market.
15
validated tests
5+
CPT-supported codes
2.5k+
clinics nationwide
Join 2.5k+ practices running smarter exams
“Carrot is saving us about 10 minutes per patient encounter, which really adds up when you're seeing 100 patients a day.”
“I can run the visual field and simultaneously work up another patient. It frees up a lot of time.”
“Now with Carrot, we can offer Esterman tests. For patients who need a DMV form, we can perform that test and bill for it.”
“Onboarding with Carrot is one of the easiest things we've done. New techs are literally able to use it the same day.”
“The implementation was super easy. It showed up, I turned it on, it connected, I logged in, and clicked run test.”
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