Adam Szaronos is the president and CEO of Trukera Medical (formally TearLab Corp.), a company that develops and markets comprehensive corneal health technologies, headquartered in Southlake, Texas. Last year, Trukera Medical launched the ScoutPro Osmolarity System, the first portable osmometer for testing tear osmolarity in the United States. Mr. Szaronos has more than 15 years of industry experience in the pharmaceutical, medical device and medical technology sectors, including previous leadership positions at Alcon.

Ophthalmology Management: Can you discuss the ScoutPro Osmolarity System and how it works?

Adam Szaronos: The ScoutPro Osmolarity System is a portable system that brings together consistent and controlled specimen collection, and a rapid specimen analysis, in a single handheld device. For a high-volume practice, this creates a number of important time and efficiency improvements.

For example, with the ScoutPro, a technician no longer needs to bring a patient to a centralized testing room or, alternatively, bring a patient’s tear sample to a base unit in order to obtain the osmolarity value, as its predecessor required (the TearLab Osmolarity System was a large and fixed-site laboratory diagnostic unit). Also, from initial setup to laboratory result, end-to-end testing time has also been reduced to less than 15 seconds per eye. These were critical improvements necessary to meet the higher volume testing demands in today’s premium cataract/refractive practices.

Another highlight of the ScoutPro is that the patient’s lab result is immediately available on the device’s LCD screen, which we’ve found to be a benefit in terms of patient engagement and compliance. Additionally, the unit maintains up to two prior test results in memory, eliminating any chance of losing an osmolarity value because it was not written down.

OM: Last year, the company rebranded from TearLab Corp. to Trukera Medical. Can you discuss the drive behind the rebrand?

AS: Over the past few years, we began to see a massive shift in the demand patterns for osmolarity testing — the practices starting to incorporate testing at the highest volumes were not coming from the traditional “dry eye” segment, but from many of the country’s leading cornea and cataract/refractive practices.

This data caught our attention. When we met with the surgeons and medical optometrists in those practices, we heard an identical story — where the surgery had been well executed, delivering 20/20 visual acuity, but the patient was “20/20 unhappy.” The practices were looking for solutions to quickly and objectively identify these patients prior to surgery and to help manage the vision quality impact postoperatively.

Today, we know clinically much more about the reasons for these 20/20 unhappy results. Even moderate hyperosmolarity can create transient light scattering equivalent to a grade 2-3 cataract in terms of its impact to quality of vision, a condition not detectable in a slit lamp. This helps explain the 20/20 surgical results they’d deliver in terms of visual acuity, but were being met with dissatisfied patients in terms of the perceived quality of vision.

This evolution in customer needs was a critical insight for us and helped define the business we were in moving forward — the advancement of corneal health for visual outcomes, or, as we like to say, a “20/20 happy business.”

Given we were preparing to expand our portfolio, moving beyond our founding TearLab technology, we felt it was necessary to have a corporate identity that better reflected our growing vision in corneal health. This is why we rebranded last year from TearLab Corp. to Trukera Medical. The name literally means, “authentic” or “true” cornea.

OM: What other products and services has Trukera Medical introduced recently, and what’s next for the company?

AS: This year, we introduced two new automated portals to further optimize our support of the entire customer team — a comprehensive customer portal designed for each role in the practice that provides on-demand staff training, resources, ordering/billing support and an AI-based chatbot to help quickly respond to the most common questions. We have also introduced a patient portal, which can be accessed via a QR code after the patient receives their lab results, to provide patient education around hyperosmolarity and track their specific test results over time.

Moving forward, our company is well positioned to significantly increase the impact we’re able to have in advancing corneal health. We’re fortunate to have a lot at our backs today that didn’t exist only a few years ago — like clinical and societal support around the impact hyperosmolarity has on quality of vision, our new customer-centered team and resources, and a next-generation technology.

We’ve only started to scratch the surface of the nearly 5 million cataract procedures done annually in the United States and are excited about the opportunity this creates for us to have a positive impact for more practices and the patients they serve. OM