NEWBERRY — You won’t need to put on glasses or have your eyes checked to see the new and improved renovations to Montgomery and Riddle Eyecare.
Montgomery and Riddle Eyecare, whose building joins with the Eye Care Center, wants to provide the community with a more centralized location where patients can have everything done in one place.
“If the patients that are here want to shop for glasses then they are able to walk back and forth and do that. They don’t have to take their prescriptions over there. They can go wherever they want. We wanted to provide a nice facility for our patients in Newberry, to provide the most up-to-date testing equipment and also have additional places for testing,” said Dr. Keith Riddle.
Construction on the building first began in November 2015 and was completed by October 2016 and ready for move-in. For Montgomery and Riddle, the building is 6,400 sq. feet and the Eye Care Center is 4,000 sq. feet. With the new addition, their are seven new exam lanes, three testing rooms, the latest diagnostic equipment, dedicated billing department, larger waiting areas and better patient flow.
The Eye Care Center has also doubled on their optical care, with a renovated sign, an additional lane and testing room.
“We do primary eye care and we’re able to offer diagnostic testing and this gave us a little room to update our laboratory. We grind our own lenses here and a lot of prescriptions we can make here on site. This brings eye care into one big building in Newberry,” said Dr. Robert Branch. Dr. Timothy Stafford and Maria Dickerson are also optometrists at the Eye Care Center.
“Patients don’t feel like they have to go out of town to get a first class experience, which has been nice,” said Riddle.
Dr. Riddle and Montgomery, both board certified opthalmologists, specialize in comprehensive eye care among multiple types of surgeries, including lasik, retinal laser and cataract surgery, which Riddle said is their practices primary concentration.
Riddle received his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina and completed his residency at the Storm Eye Institute, serving as Chief resident. After completing his residency, Riddle was selected for a prestigious corneal fellowship in Laser Vision Correction and corneal transplantation at Corneal Consultants of Indiana.
Dr. Jacob Montgomery received his Doctorate of Medicine from the Medical University of South Carolina of Charleston. Montgomery completed his residency in Ophthalmology at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia. Montgomery has been practicing Ophthalmology since 1999 and is a member of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons
“Smith Constructors and Engineers did a fabulous job. The first thing that patients that have been seeing us for a while say is how wonderful the new facility is, because they were used to our old building and they are as happy as we are. The flow now is much better and people have plenty of places to sit,” said Riddle. “We are in a central location and we are in the building together, but we are separate practices with separate entrances. We have connecting doors to get from one side to the other for patients who want to shop optical, but we encourage our patients to shop locally here but they can take their prescriptions wherever they want to.”
