Alcon Experience Academy provides training worldwide

Education offered via online video library and in person at wet lab sites.

By Robert Stoneback, associate editor

Alcon’s newest initiative, the Alcon Experience Academy, is helping to educate ophthalmologists both online and face to face.

The Academy offers a digital library of more than 500 educational videos at its website (www.AlconExperienceAcademy.com ), which focus primarily on real-world surgical case studies using new ophthalmic technology. The Academy also provides in-person training at six Alcon Experience Centers: Fort Worth, Texas; Barcelona, Spain; Tokyo and Osaka, Japan; Sydney, Australia, and Bogotá, Colombia. Two additional cities, São Paulo, Brazil, and Beijing, China, will get centers soon as well. Alcon also offers 26 training centers and 42 wet labs to provide additional education and training as part of the Academy.

TRAINING WORLDWIDE

Steve Charles, MD, of the Charles Retina Institute, Germantown, Tenn., is a consultant for Alcon and has 20 of his lectures on the Alcon Experience website. For Dr. Charles, being associated with the Academy helps support his personal mission of educating his fellow ophthalmologists.

The Academy, which is a non-commercial project, can reach physicians in developing countries who may not have access to the resources or time to visit one of Alcon’s education centers or wet labs, says Dr. Charles.

ACCESSIBILITY IS CRUCIAL

Easy access to training is crucial, says Dr. Charles, as better-educated surgeons are more efficient surgeons. He recalled his experience on an Alcon surgical teaching trip to China where one community had a two-year backlog for vitreoretinal surgery patients. The reason, he said, was the local surgeons were not trained on efficiency and could only complete two operations a day. After spending a week with the surgeons, Dr. Charles returned a year later and they were performing 10 procedures a day. By providing education to people across the globe, an online resource like the Academy “helps people who are suffering worldwide,” says Dr. Charles.

WET LAB TRAINING

Some techniques are better taught in person, he adds, which is where Academy lessons at the Experience Centers can help. Dr. Charles has participated in teaching at the facility in Fort Worth and calls it a “great experience” to stand next to other doctors who are using new devices and learning new techniques. Even ophthalmologists who have performed surgery for decades need help learning new methods, says Dr. Charles, and, because the exercises are performed on artificial eyes, they do so without risk to patients. OM

Mastering your EMR system

Three tips from industry experts on how to get the most out of your EMR.

• “Two key ways to optimize a system are hiding information that does not add value to the patient exam and reducing clicks. Many systems offer what I call ‘training-wheel prompts,’ which can be helpful when first learning a system. However, once the user has gained muscle memory a few months into using the system, these prompts can become repetitive, irritating and distractive. It is best to hide or remove them when possible. Also, the optimization of systems varies based on system capabilities, but a clean pick list should be possible with any system. For example, when working up a patient with historical and active diagnosis of cataracts OU, the system should not offer IOL pick list items in the lens section of the slit lamp exam. Your system should be smart enough to filter out items and not offer impossible scenarios. If your system does have this intelligence built in, you will want to create intelligent rules and workflows to streamline efficiency.” — Tera Roy, VP of Business Development, Nextech
• “To have a EMR feel like your own, it should be built for ophthalmologists by ophthalmologists, adapt to your preferences and integrate seamlessly with your practice. In addition, it should accommodate different workflows for subspecialists; a retina specialist’s needs are vastly different from those of a high-volume cataract surgeon, and the EMR should work just as well for either. By having a system that is tailored to your specific practice, efficiencies will be created and administrative effort reduced. The benefit? More face-to-face time with patients and their families and an improved work-life balance for you.” — Michael Rivers, MD, director, EMA Ophthalmology at Modernizing Medicine
• “I recommend nominating a ‘super user’ (or group of super users) who will be your champion of change and progress. Super users should be in charge of training new staff members and meeting with the practice’s leadership often to determine what efficiencies can be added and what system adjustments need to be done (even if they are incredibly minor — every second counts). After training is completed, scheduling time for refreshers with a trainer either annually or during system enhancements will help keep you up to speed with all the new features. Also, it will jog your memory on the system’s features that may not have been passed on to new hires. This can allow them to evaluate your current usage of the system and give your team ideas on how the setup may need to be tweaked.” — Anish Kapur, MD, vice president, Enterprise Solutions & Business Development, Eye Care Leaders

FDA clears Heidelberg’s Spectralis OCTA module

By Robert Stoneback, associate editor

The FDA cleared Heidelberg Engineering’s OCT Angiography Module, making it now available to U.S. users of the company’s Spectralis upgradeable diagnostic imaging device.

International experience with the Spectralis OCTA Module confirmed its ability to acquire clinically relevant data, says Ram Liebenthal, general manager of Heidelberg Engineering.

ADDING OCTA

SriniVas Sadda, MD, president and chief scientific officer of the Doheny Eye Institute, and professor of ophthalmology, at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the addition of OCT angiography to a Spectralis platform “is invaluable.” Dr. Sadda has used the module for more than a year and has found it very useful in his practice.

While ophthalmology is still “in the early days of OCT angiography,” the feature offers many advantages, Dr. Sadda says. Heidelberg’s module takes high-resolution images, especially for axial and depth direction, and the image quality lets physicians better discriminate between the various levels of the retinal circulation.

MOVEMENT DETECTION

Another advantage of Heidelberg’s module is its “probabilistic approach” to identifying motion, which is presumed to be due to blood flow, says Dr. Sadda. The same location is scanned several times in succession to determine changes. “You are effectively averaging information from multiple scans,” looking for differences, he says, and this increases confidence that the flow signal is real.

OCT angiography will only become more important, Dr. Sadda says. “Every ophthalmologist really needs to learn about [it], including its underlying principles and limitations.” OM