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Wills Eye Hospital advances telemedicine efforts
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PHILADELPHIA — Advancing telemedicine screening protocols may be key in the future of diagnosing and treating diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, according to a speaker.
At the Wills Vision Research Center at Jefferson annual symposium, S.K. Steven Houston III, MD, discussed advances in telemedicine technology at Wills Eye Hospital.
Recently, the hospital has been collaborating with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in order to obtain data of pathology and problems, and then feed an OCT image into a “deep learning” computer system to create predictive analytics.
“We can identify those at highest risk of progression or blindness. We can identify which patients may respond best to specific treatments and determine which patients may need closer monitoring between treatments,” Houston said.
The hospital is also using two FDA-cleared home monitoring systems, myVisionTrack (Vital Art and Science) and ForeseeHome (Notal Vision), in order to identify acute changes in disease status for early intervention.
Lastly, the hospital provides virtual ophthalmic expertise through two programs. The expert ophthalmic second opinions program delivers remote patient consults via video conferencing, powered by the JeffConnect system, to provide second opinions from Wills Eye subspecialty experts to patients across the world. The virtual ophthalmology emergency/acute-care consults program, which is a pilot program, uses virtual technology to evaluate and validate the use of virtual ophthalmic consultations in an emergency room setting at Wills Eye.
“Predictive analytics, home monitoring and virtual consults have the potential to improve outcomes, improve quality and decrease costs,” Houston said. – by Kristie L. Kahl
Disclosure: Houston reports he is a speaker for Wills Eye Hospital.