Clarkson Eyecare was founded in 1979 by Lawrence J. Jehling, O.D. and Lynette S. Lui, O.D. as the Jehling-Lui Eye Associates on Clarkson Road in Ellisville, Missouri. In March of 1987, Dr. Jehling moved the practice one block north to its current location and renamed the practice Clarkson Eyecare.

A few years later, Dr. Jehling opened a second office in Pacific, Missouri, called Pacific Eyecare. A full-service lens-grinding laboratory was then added to the Pacific location.

In 1995, Drs. James Wachter, Henry Allhoff, Katherine Reynolds and Robert Lamberg, along with Dr. Jehling and his brother, Gerald Jehling, merged the Ellisville and Pacific offices with Osage Eyecare in House Springs, Missouri, and The Eye Institute of St. Louis in Clayton, Missouri. All four offices took the name Clarkson Eyecare. The merger ignited the rapid growth of the company.

Today, Clarkson Eyecare has expanded to more than 50 offices located throughout Central and Eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois.

In 1999, Clarkson Eyecare introduced its first state-of-the-art LASIK Surgery Center located in Chesterfield Valley. For the convenience of our patients, we added another facility in Fairview Heights, IL in 2007.  Today, Clarkson Eyecare offers iLASIK™, which is the only LASIK surgery approved by NASA and the U.S. Military.

Clarkson Eyecare began marketing its very own software to other practices in 2006. Developed from the input of our own doctors, this software enables optometrists, ophthalmologists and their staffs to create a better patient experience through Electronic Medical Records (EMR). With this new technology, appointments, insurance verification, billing, inventory and eye exams are all done electronically.