This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Outcomes analyses can be applied to myopia
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
To the Editor:
I am retired from clinical practice, but your editorial (“ODs must ‘find a fix’ for myopia,” December 2014) brought me back to the early days of my optometric career listening to Dr. Getman and attending Optometric Extension Program lectures where many of the same issues regarding myopia were addressed.
As you state, myopia persists as an issue that only optometry is in a position to address from a functional standpoint. During my career, the complexity and cost of scientific studies on myopia control were always issues that seemed to limit effective research and progress. One of the exciting developments that is coming out of health care reform is the ability to track and analyze clinical outcomes at a very low cost and effort.
Myopia progression is a clinical outcome just like any other clinical outcome that can be tracked and analyzed. Electronic health records can be programmed to automatically extract the appropriate data. That data can be automatically sent through secure direct messaging to a registry that can perform highly complex, long-term analytics and report the clinical outcomes, allowing providers to be able to assess the outcomes of any treatments that any provider is utilizing.
The tools that may allow optometry as a profession to start making meaningful progress toward really understanding what causes myopic progression, as well as many other perplexing issues that face our profession, are now at our reach. All we need to do is realize the opportunity and start using these new tools to address longstanding issues such as myopia progression control.
Jim Grue, OD