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South Carolina Supreme Court upholds state’s Eye Care Patient Protection Law
January 27, 2026
Favorable ruling ends a decade-long legal battle for the South Carolina Optometric Physicians Association.
Tag(s): Advocacy, State Advocacy
The 10-year effort to protect South Carolinians’ eye health has ended with a win. This month, the state Supreme Court ruled that the South Carolina Eye Care Consumer Protection Law (ECCPL), which passed in 2016, is constitutional.
“We were thrilled to receive the court’s opinion,” says Johndra McNeely, O.D., South Carolina Optometric Physicians Association (SCOPA) past president and current member of the AOA Federal Relations and Advocacy Action Committee. “It is a step toward patient safety.”
Lengthy legal challenges
South Carolina’s ECCPL ensures that remote vision testing technologies and telehealth services enhance care, deliver the best outcomes and strengthen the doctor-patient relationship at the heart of sound health care decision-making by holding kiosks and online technologies accountable for providing the same standard of care that is expected of a qualified, competent eye care physician.
Jointly supported by SCOPA and the South Carolina Medical Association, the bipartisan S. 1016 (ECCPL) passed the General Assembly in May 2016 only to be vetoed by then-Gov. Nikki Haley and, in-turn, countermanded by the legislature days later.
That same year, the remote vision testing application Visibly (formerly known as Opternative) filed a legal challenge against South Carolina’s ECCPL. The case was initially dismissed in 2018, but the Court of Appeals reversed that decision in 2021, allowing the constitutional challenge to proceed. A circuit court judge granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants, including SCOPA, in 2024. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld that decision in its ruling this month.
AOA echoes South Carolina’s concerns
Eye care consumer protection laws such as South Carolina’s ECCPL originated in response to mounting concerns over vision test kiosks and online applications providing refractive-only tests that decoupled vision acuity from a comprehensive eye health examination.
The year South Carolina’s ECCPL was passed, the AOA filed an expansive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) complaint against Visibly (Opternative) for posing a significant health risk to the public and failing to receive premarket approval for its device. At the same time, a “Good Morning America” investigation found the test missed risk factors for glaucoma while also yielding vastly different acuity results than an in-person exam with an eye doctor.
The AOA’s concerns were validated in a 2017 FDA warning letter and a 2019 FDA enforcement action against Visibly (Opternative). The renamed Visibly Digital Acuity Product did receive FDA clearance as a visual acuity assessment for healthy people ages 22 to 40 in 2022, not to be used as a replacement for a comprehensive eye examination.