Optometry Board to Adopt a Dozen Rules and Leave Two Behind

The Texas Optometry Board will meet Nov. 13 and vote on adopting a dozen rewritten rules covering prescriptions, advertising, patient records and optometrists’ dealings with the opticians who sell glasses. Two rules proposed in the same package are not on the list.

The package came out of the board’s four-year review of its own rulebook and was published in September; comment closed Oct. 5. Most of it strips language that only repeats state law. Some of it bites. One amendment would make a licensee answerable for any prescription signed in their name and require them to report an unauthorized one within seven business days. Another drops the requirement that patient records be written, allowing any format. A third would give an optometrist examining patients at a nursing home or a worksite three ways to meet the duty of follow-up care, including guaranteed telehealth access, where the rule now leans on being physically nearby.

The rules walling optometry off from retail eyewear survive intact. Since 1999 state law has required a solid floor-to-ceiling partition and a separate patient entrance wherever an optometrist practices alongside a dispensing optician, the aim being to keep a retailer from steering a clinician’s judgment. The amendment deletes the statute the rule had quoted back and keeps the operative line: the two spaces may not be joined by a wall with a door in it, locked or unlocked.

The two missing rules are the more interesting absence. Both govern what an eye examination must include, and both were proposed on Sept. 4 with the rest of the package. The Dispatch found no notice withdrawing them. In April 2024 the governor’s regulatory compliance office disapproved earlier versions of those same two sections, which would have required an in-person examination before an optometrist could prescribe; a blanket bar on telehealth, that office wrote, was a barrier to competition the Legislature had not clearly authorized. The board has not said publicly why the two are off the November list.

Also on the agenda: a new schedule of fines to be sent out for comment, and three optometry school liaison reports — Texas had two schools until the Rio Grande Valley began clearing accreditation for a third.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Ronald L. Hopping, O.D. — chair; Friendswood; managing partner, Hopping Eye Associates.
• Bill Thompson, O.D. — vice chair; Richardson; owner, Buckner Vision.
• Judy Chambers — secretary; Austin; public member.
• Tory Moore, O.D. — Dumas; owner, Dumas Vision Source.
• Steven Nguyen, O.D. — Irving; owner, Southwest Dallas Eyecare.
• James Oevermann, O.D. — Montgomery; Cypress Family Eyecare.
• Carey A. Patrick, O.D. — Allen; president, Fairview Eyecare.
• René Peña — El Paso; accountant; public member.
• Mala Sharma — Houston; attorney; public member.

All nine seats are filled, six optometrists and three public members, as the statute requires. Names, cities and terms are from the board’s roster page, checked November 5, and match the governor’s releases: Hopping named chair in December 2023 alongside Sharma and Nguyen, and Moore, Oevermann and the reappointment of Chambers in March 2025. No 2026 appointment release for this board was found. Three terms — Hopping’s, Patrick’s and Peña’s — expire January 31, 2027, though the chairmanship itself runs at the governor’s pleasure.