What patients actually see through every lens
Patient Experience collects post-operative outcome reports from people who have had cataract surgery, and attaches each report to a specific intraocular lens in the IOL Reference database — to the exact model, not to a brand family, so a toric lens is never averaged together with its non-toric sibling.
What is measured
The questions are not invented. They follow the instruments used in peer-reviewed IOL outcome research so the results can be read against a published series:
- Vision by distance — task-based difficulty in the VF-14 family, asked separately for far, arm's length and reading, each anchored to concrete tasks such as reading a road sign, a computer screen, or a medicine label.
- Night driving — asked as its own item, because it is the activity that most reliably separates one lens type from another.
- Halos, glare and starbursts — graded on two axes, how often and how strong, and scored entirely separately from the satisfaction rating. Severity is chosen from rendered night-scene images rather than a number, so "moderate" means the same thing to every respondent.
- Glasses afterwards — reported separately for distance, intermediate and near, since most people end up needing them for one and not the others.
Why it is separate from the star rating
Visual disturbances are never folded into the overall rating. A lens can be genuinely well liked and still produce rings around headlights; pooling the two hides exactly the trade-off a patient is trying to understand before surgery.
Who reports
Reports arriving through a surgeon's post-operative link carry a verified badge. All reports are published without names — initials and age band only — and no protected health information is collected.
Share your own experience, or browse every lens in the database.