Employees can now get eye exams in the same amount of time it takes to grab a cup of coffee.
2020 On-site is a Boston-based company that brings concierge-style mobile vision centers to employers like Yankee Candle, Microsoft and Wayfair for about $5 per employee as an added HR benefit.
“Before us, on-site healthcare was only available to offices of 10,000 people or more. We’re making it incredibly economical. Almost no one in HR has thought about on-site healthcare because it’s never been close to being economically viable,” says Howard Bornstein, 2020 On-site’s founder and CEO.
The service parks its 34-foot van outside an employer’s office for one day or more, depending on need, with proper permits and an optometrist waiting to see scheduled employees.
“In terms of the work, it’s been very touchless for us,” says Alyssa McLaughlin, benefits specialist for HubSpot, a Cambridge, Mass.-based inbound marketing, sales, and CRM software provider. “They will send us the content to send to employees or the content to post to the portal. There’s no action needed on our part.”
The system is solely managed by 2020 On-site, so if the schedule fills up, HR doesn’t need to do anything but schedule another visit.
“They’ve done all of it behind the scenes where it hasn’t disrupted us at all,” says McLaughlin. “It’s out of our hands.”
A covered benefit
Because 2020 On-site functions as a benefit, it evaluates the company’s insurance plan and creates a landing web page for employees at the company it is servicing, says Bornstein.
It also offers a co-pay match guarantee to ensure employees don’t pay more by taking advantage of the employer-provided benefit. Employees who are out-of-network can also pay a flat $70 fee for an appointment.
Boston-based ecommerce site Wayfair has used 2020 On-site for its largely millennial workforce since 2014.
Of the 2,000 employees located in the Boston office, 550 of them have visited 2020 On-site, according to Wayfair.
“It’s a pretty low cost, massively low time commitment to roll out a cool employee perk,” says Kate Gulliver, vice president of talent operations at Wayfair and a member of 2020 On-site’s advisory board. “Our employees like it and it’s a benefit to them. It’s obviously a benefit to us because they’re not out of the office for long.”
Gulliver says 2020 On-site’s scheduling platform and ease of getting an eye exam right outside the office made the HR benefit an easy choice, especially when Wayfair’s millennial employees expect on-demand and
The company currently offers telemedicine options and fitness classes — benefits employees can leverage quickly, she says.
Seeing is believing
The service is also useful to employees who don’t normally go for an annual eye exam.
Seventy percent of 2020 On-site patients had an exam for the first time ever or for the first time in two years, according to the company.
Similarly, 82% of patients received new prescriptions, which indicated that they had been living and working with less than optimal vision.
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Russ Campanello, executive vice president of HR for technology company iRobot, is part of that majority.
“I’m also one of the people who discovered they needed glasses,” says the executive for the company based in Bedford, Mass. “I was getting by with cheaters for reading glasses but I hadn’t known my distance had deteriorated.”
Four in 10 iRobot employees hadn’t had an eye exam in the past two to five years, says Campanello. “While we always offered a vision benefit to our employees, we were not always getting the utilization you’d like to see,” he says.
HubSpot also found utilization rates increased when they began offering 2020 On-site in 2014.
Since offering the benefit, 2020 On-site has performed close to 200 eye exams for iRobot employees and 492 eye exams for HubSpot employees.
iRobot, HubSpot and Wayfair are part of the 250 employers serviced by 2020 On-site in the Boston area; the vision company has also has begun expanding to cities outside of Boston like Atlanta and Chicago.
While 2020 On-site doesn’t take up office space, its bright white van interior, paperless records, completely digital eye exams, a customer service hotline and concierge amenities attract not just millennials but the entire workforce, says 2020’s Bornstein.
“We’re the Apple store for your eyes, and we bring it to your office,” he says.
