Telehealth Is Opening the Doors for Patient Eye Health

<p class="p1">This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss.</p> <p class="p1">Today’s big idea is: How will remote diagnostic tests change ophthalmology and vision care? It might be a foreign concept for some, but the specialists in today’s episode, Dr. Peter Pham and Dr. Sean Ianchulev, founders of (Keep Your Sight, a nonprofit focused on remote diagnostic vision tests) share how they can conduct more reliable perimetry tests that help detect macular degeneration, glaucoma, and other conditions that lead to vision loss and eventually blindness —<span class= "Apple-converted-space"> </span> remotely, while patients stay home. Developments like these in remote diagnostics are a stepping stone for the ways machine learning will impact the field of ophthalmology in the future. This episode also features Dr. Einar Stefansson and Dr. Arna Gudmundsdottir, developers of the app, Retina Risk, which helps with remote risk assessment of diabetic eye disease for people with diabetes, as well as Sherrill Jones, who lost her vision due to glaucoma.</p> <p class="p2"> </p> <p class="p1"><strong>The Big Takeaways:</strong></p> <ul class="ul1"> <li class="li4"><span class="s1">Retina Risk was created to help people with diabetes assess in real-time their individualized risk for sight-threatening diabetic retinopathy. The app was created back in 2009 and the concept of using technology and algorithms to calculate risk was still quite foreign to most people.</span></li> <li class="li4"><span class="s1">What goes into taking a regular perimetry test today? Patients have to come into the office, wait, register, wait some more, get taken to a dark room to be positioned correctly, and after 20-30 minutes, you get a result. Now, there’s an easier way: patients can take these tests at home.</span></li> <li class="li4"><span class="s1">Why is telescreening so important? Dr. Pham and Dr. Ianchulev noticed it could take months for patients to be scheduled in for routine visual field te