On May 31 2017, EyePACS completed its 500,000th retinal exam, meaning our system has now imaged the retinas of a half-million diabetic patients! EyePACS, through its partner clinics, has now logged more than three-million images. We feel very fortunate and grateful to work with like-minded clinic leaders and clinicians and all of their co-workers who have enthusiastically adopted this vital service for their patients. Our partner primary care clinics have integrated this nontraditional service into their workflow in order to fight one of the most devastating effects of chronic disease.
We have learned so much over the years from our primary care colleagues:
1. We learned that while timely treatment is very effective in preventing vision loss from diabetes, blindness continues to occur when eye treatment is not initiated in a timely fashion.
Our development efforts here at EyePACS are now focused on enhancing the connections between primary care and specialty eye care in order to address factors that impede the road to treatment. Please stay tuned as we roll out new programs to improve patient education, referral workflows, and treatment follow up. In order to enhance this effort, we hope our partner clinics will let us know what new features and changes from EyePACS would help them better serve their patients.
2. We learned the importance of having solidly validated technology and processes. With the rush to bring new smaller and cheaper retinal imaging devices to the market place, it’s important to remember that retinal screening is only as effective as the quality of retinal images that can be obtained. At EyePACS, therefore, we are committed to using only those devices that can truly detect the many fine lesions that must be seen in order to manage your patients' retinas at all stages of their disease.
3. While EyePACS has evolved over the years, we know this is just the beginning. Health care is changing dramatically. We have had several wonderful opportunities to participate in the study of cutting edge technology such as using artificial intelligence and deep machine learning to automate the evaluation of retinal images. As health care continues to change, though, what will not change is our focus on safety net clinics and our partnership with primary care.
Thanks again for your support!
The EyePACS Team
