Providing 33 percent of all the useable eye tissue in the nation is the job of the Alabama Eye Bank, which relies heavily on volunteers in its daily operation.
article from Business Alabama magazine
By Russell Richey
Photo by Caroline Baird Summers
For over 36 years, the Alabama Eye Bank has been giving the priceless gift of sight to those in need. The Birmingham-headquartered, nonprofit organization is internationally recognized as a leader in the field of corneal transplantation, not only in terms of annual tissue recovery statistics, but in research, teaching and the development of distribution networks.
Doyce Williams
Executive Director Doyce Williams has been with the organization for 25years,and is still as enthusiastically devoted to making the AEB an innovator as he was in 1980 when the Eye Bank only had a staff of two.
Now, with offices in Montgomery, Mobile, Huntsville and Birmingham, the Alabama Eye Bank is the sixth-largest in the nation, and has the distinction of being one of two eye banks in the U.S. to remain consecutively in the top 10 percent of all the eye banks in the world for 23 years.
Business Alabama recently had an opportunity to sit down with Williams to discuss the Alabama Eye Bank’s mission and its innovative programs and initiatives.
Familiarize us with the Alabama Eye Bank and its mission.
We provide 33 percent of all the useable tissue in this country through our network and system. We place tissue in most of the states in this country, and are now providing eight foreign countries on a regular basis. I see the Alabama Eye Bank as a pebble in a pond. We provide a gift that someone has given, to a transplant recipient primarily, and that pebble once it’s in the water, begins
to spread out in other ways — where suppliers that we buy from, hospitals and their employees, surgery centers and their physicians all benefit, and of course the patient returns back to work. So we also provide ripples of economic impact.
What enables the Eye Bank to run such a lean operation?
We are really able to put a business model together that makes the eye bank function more effectively and efficiently. Other entities our size would have maybe as many as twice the employees that we do. But we cross-train our employees and they have many other functions that are involved with, so we keep our budget and costs low. You might still ask: how does an organization provide millions and millions of dollars of service with just 40 people? The reason for that, which is the hidden reason for all nonprofits, is volunteerism. I’ll go to
a hospital tomorrow and talk to a nursing unit about the need for donations.
That nurse, un-reimbursed by us, will then be ready to communicate with a family about a donation. For us as an eye bank, we would have to have hundreds of staff members if not for a structure that allows fire, law enforcement, forensic sciences, including coroners and medical examiners, nurses and doctors, hospice field directors — everybody in the death and dying process — volunteering their time to contribute to the productivity of procurement.
The Alabama Eye Bank is known for being highly innovative – give us an
example.
We are the only state in the country that has a macular degeneration registry for macular degeneration patients. The emphasis is obviously that they will be donors, and because our rapidly increasing awareness of the tissue disease, we are now able to give the researchers tissue within four hours of death, meaning that they are able to study the disease in ways unparalleled to the past.
The Alabama Eye Bank also stays very “focused,” no pun intended, on a certain area within the field of ophthalmology – is that right?
One of the reasons that we are successful is that we have remained
very focused on one thing: corneal transplantation, research and teaching. We have remained very focused, feeling that we would do one thing right, well and better than others, and that has really helped us a great deal. When you look at ophthalmology, we only do a very specific thing and you’ve also got areas devoted to the retina, cataracts and glaucoma. We concentrate on cornea work and
that means that all of our energies, all of our study, all of our preparation and all of our training are within a very, very defined area.
Tell us about some of the exciting things happening now for your organization.
One of the more enterprising things we are doing is working with a firm in Italy, to develop, both for a research format and a usable format, a new solution that will allow us to preserve the corneas for up to 10 days. We are one of the few entities in the world that is working on that study. The eye bank also has been asked to provide tissue to the state of Israel for indigent patients. Last week, I went to Mobile for a meeting with an individual and I asked him if he would be willing to help us realize a project in Israel, and through the generosity of a grant, we will be able to provide tissue for the next year to those in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
I understand that exciting advances are happening across your entire field, as well.
In that last three years, results of experiment, research and of actual practice have evolved into a new transplant procedure that some believe will be the standard of transplantation for the next decade and beyond. It is using the laser that most people know from refractive surgery to secure the donor cornea, take the recipient cornea, cut the top of the cornea back using laser techniques
and place the other cornea back in the eye, using both the donor and recipient cornea. It’s an amazing technique and within the last six months or year, we have been seeing an enormous number of requests for tissue prepared for this.
How is industry regulation impacting your activities?
Regulations are so demanding that there is a substantial cost for compliance, and now that we are a federally licensed, certified and an accredited eye bank — each one of those terms is expensive! So now what we have is some staff that are nothing but compliance coordinators. They understand the laws and ensure that all of our records comply.
Some of the regulations are vital. With the lifestyle of some of the individuals that donate, we have to check for AIDS; we’ve got to check for hepatitis, and so those regulations are all good, but they are very expensive and time-delaying.
How have your shipping logistics been affected by changes in transportation security brought about by the realities of a post-9/11 world?
Before 9/11, I would personally walk on the plane, shake the hand of the pilot and say thank you for taking this for us and he would put the package underneath his seat and at the next port, somebody else would do the same thing. Now,because of the regulations imposed by Homeland Security, everything goes through screening, so now we have to go through that screening process and it costs more money, effort and time. Another difficulty is that we
are sending tissue throughout the world, so when we are sending tissue to Paris and then to Athens, it takes a great deal of organization to make sure the person in Paris shows up and transfers it to the next flight. So that aspect of management is not always seen in what we do.
What is your organization’s philosophy with regard to marketing?
There is always the issue of communications with our supporters and friends. Death that comes in trauma comes very quickly, and people that were today riding around in a car may not realize that this evening a car accident will kill them. Therefore, their families are not aware or have thought about donation, so the
frustration is the communication of information within that reality so that people are at least thinking about it or discussing it, so that when that tragic time occurs, at least they will have an answer. Sometimes it’s hard to realize that you are running a business, but you are running a business of people and of emotions and of families’ dreams and hopes.
A regular contributor to Business Alabama, Russell Richey is a principal at Wilhite-Richey, a Birmingham-based marketing research and consulting firm. He can be reached at russell@wilhiterichey.com.
