Eyeworld

EW FEATURE 46 Patient satisfaction • December 2015 into medical records and then take them on a digital tour of their eyes. Dr. Durrie would supplement this with Eyemaginations animations, as well as those depicting the proce- dure at hand, Dr. Waring explained. "We use that strategy today and have customized it to our clinic and our next-generation diagnostics that include functional vision tests," he said, adding that taking the patient on a digital tour of his/her own eyes is more meaningful because you can demonstrate where the dysfunction may be. For example, in the scope of dysfunctional lens syndrome, practitioners can educate patients by grading their dysfunctional lens. "When they see it, we can correlate with functional vision testing the effect of the dysfunctionality on their visual performance in the form of light scatter and/or densitome- try," Dr. Waring said. "We can even show them the light as it's coming through their eye and falling on the retina. We can show them if it's a high-quality image or if it's a low-quality path." Patients then understand why they may not be seeing as well as they would like. What's more, with advanced functional diagnostics such as the double-pass wavefront that Dr. Waring routinely uses with the AcuTarget HD (AcuFocus, Irvine, Calif.), he can even assign a score to the patient's vision, such as the ocular objective scatter index. This is something that he finds is much more meaningful for patients com- pared to the historical gold stan- dard of Snellen visual acuity. "We can give them a score and follow it through their lifetime, and that helps us understand how we can better meet their needs," he said. For example, it can help practi- tioners to decide whether it makes more sense to operate on their cornea or on their crystalline lens, which may have become dysfunc- tional, Dr. Waring noted, adding that it is then much easier to explain this decision to patients by show- ing them the dysfunction in their own eye. He finds that this takes what used to be one of the most challenging and lengthy discussions with a patient and simplifies the process. "The patients appreciate it, and they're much more comfortable with the choices," he said. The practice has different tracks for different types of patients, Dr. Waring said. Someone who is younger than age 50 and interested in surgical vision correction may be on the "LASIK track" while High-tech process George O. Waring IV, MD, assis- tant professor of ophthalmology, and director of refractive surgery, Medical University of South Caro- lina, Charleston, takes a high-tech approach to patient education. He said there has been a great deal of innovation over the last decade in this regard beginning with software animations from Eyemaginations (Baltimore) and continuing with the advent of tablets that allow practitioners to more easily utilize digital media to educate patients. "At the same time there [has been] a tremendous amount of innovation with advanced diagnostics," he said. Dr. Waring said he had the good fortune to train with Daniel S. Durrie, MD, who coined what is called the advanced ocular analysis approach whereby he would import digital images of the patients' eyes By the book continued from page 45 He tells patients that when they lay down for the treatment there might be some issues—that the treatment might not be symmetri- cal and that there are geometrical considerations as well. "When you add up all of these little things, it explains why the vision might not be satisfactory or may require some kind of touch-up in comparison to low myopes," Dr. Gatinel said. continued on page 48

• Cover