Podcasts about dry eye coach

Walt: Hi, welcome to Dry Eye Coach podcast. My name is Walt Whitley. Today we’re going to talk about ways for practices to start running dry eye trials. Clinical research is a critical element to improving the options and solutions available for patients. For some practices, there are so many unknowns and question mark they don’t […]

Walt Whitley: Hi. I’m Dr. Walt Whitley with Dry Eye Coach podcast. Thank you all for joining us. Today our topic will be a conversation with innovators in the dry eye space. Our guests include three key industry executives from small, innovative companies focused on dry eye. Our first guest is Zac Denning, director of […]

Over the past several years, various algorithms seeking to simplify the diagnosis and treatment of DED have been developed. The ASCRS algorithm for the preoperative diagnosis and treatment of ocular surface disorders is the first one that is targeted specifically to surgical patients. Listen as Dry Eye Coach chats with Jill Showalter about how she […]

Whitney Hauser : Hi. I’m Dr. Whitney Hauser. And welcome to Dry Eye Coach podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about tips for doctors just starting out in dry eye. So, if you’re looking for some new pearls about how to add dry eye in your practice, this may be the podcast for you. Today I’m joined by assistant professor at the University of Colorado Department of Ophthalmology, Dr. Rich Mangan. Welcome, Rich. Rich Mangan : Oh, thanks, Whitney. It’s great to be here. I appreciate it. Whitney : You bet. You bet. We’re kind of excited to get to know, you know, what you think are some of the greatest things that new practitioners, or practitioners that are just trying to bring dry eye into their practice might want to add in as they develop. So, I’m going to jump in with some questions for you… Rich : Okay. Whitney : … right off the bat. And, what are the benefits to doctors and their patients for getting started, or treating dry eye disease? You know, there’s benefits on both sides, so give us a little bit… Rich : Right. Whitney: … of your thoughts there. Rich : Right. You know, certainly, the benefit for me as a doctor in getting started was just to have a greater appreciation for the fact that ocular surface disease is in fact a real disease and not just a symptom. To be honest with you, years ago I used to hate dry eye. You know, I would go and see LASIK evals and cat evals and I was really enjoying that. And then I’d pull out a chart and it’d say dry eye and, you know, I’d just shrug in agony thinking about it. But then I went to a speaker training many years ago, in fact, this was around 2002 when Restasis came out, and it really, the panel did an excellent job of just really impressing upon the attendees that, you know, the quality of life scores of dry eye can really mimic, you know, even severe things like angina or disabling hip fracture. So, when I took that to heart, and I decided that it was time to come back to my practice and truly treat it like a disease. And so, I spent some time educating my key technicians, my team leader, and we actually carved out dedicated time just to really focus and concentrate on these patients. And what it did was, after they got to hear, you know, my walking the walk and talking the talk, you know, my dry eye practice really became more efficient because they knew what I was going to say before I was going to say it. And, but they truly developed appreciation for the fact that this is a disease. Whitney : Yeah. You raise a good point, you know, about the kind of parallels that are between more serious, as they would be noted, diseases and dry eye disease. I think that’s where a lot of the disconnect is. It’s not so much that the doctors don’t believe it exists. I think that most eyecare providers do. But it’s the gravity of it. So, the patient sitting across from them I think is oftentimes what’s missing. Rich : Yeah. Whitney : So, I think you probably latched onto that well in advance of a lot of our colleagues, including myself. So… Rich : Well, I’ve been around longer than you, Whitney. I’ve had a little bit of a head start in that respect. (laughs) Whitney : Unfortunately, not by as much as one would think. (laughs) You feel like this has a positive impact on new referrals as well? Bringing new patients into your practice? Rich : You know, it really does. Keep in mind, when I first started my dry eye practice I was in a co-management, a referral center, and one of the concerns we had when I brought this idea up was, how were our referring doctors going to look at this? Would they look at it like I was competing with them? And, in fact, the response was the complete opposite. They loved the fact that they had a resource in the area that really took this seriously. Patients could

Whitney Hauser : Hi, I’m Dr. Whitney Hauser and welcome to Dry Eye Coach podcast. Today I’m joined by Dr. Selina McGee. Selina is a private practitioner and owner of Precision Vision of Edmond and she’s also the president of the Oklahoma Association of Optometric Physicians. Welcome, Selina. How are you today? Selina McGee :I’m great. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Whitney Hauser :Good. I love that we both are on the line together talking and we’re both going to have accents, and we just say that right out of the gate. It’s so true. So hopefully the listeners will not need translators for this, but I love having that shared accent with you. We’re going to go ahead and get started. I’m just going to ask you a couple of questions and just to get your perspective on things, I think what’s interesting is a lot of experts in the field, particularly of dry eye, work in a lot of different areas. They work in tertiary dry centers, which I’ve been affiliated with. They work in ophthalmology practices. Some of them work in private practice, but we don’t hear quite as much of that voice. So I’m really anxious to kind of get your perspective on that today. The first question I’m going to jump in with is why, from your perspective, is patient education on dry eye so important? How does that fit into what you do with your patients every day? Selina McGee :It’s a great question, and I’m glad you led with the fact that I’m in private practice because I think honestly it makes so much sense in private practice, maybe even more so than in a tertiary setting or a co-management setting, simply because most patients don’t recognize their symptoms with dry eye disease and it affects every piece of private practice. What I mean by that is if you have an optical like I do, if you don’t treat their dry eye, they’re going to come back with a glasses RX check. We all know that time is money, and so when you spend that on a glasses RX check and in fact it’s ocular surface disease that we missed, then that’s a huge piece of that. Contact lens patients, lots of private practices have huge contact lens practices, mine included. So if we don’t do a good job of assessing the ocular surface and making sure that is stable, then your contact lens patients are going to suffer and you’re going to spend more chair time doing refits. Selina McGee :Then if you’re co-managing your surgical patients, and the patients that I work with and a lot of cataract patients these days, they have such good premium options. But if we don’t have a premium surface to deal with, once they get to the surgeon, they’re not going to have a premium outcome. Then of course in private practice, we have patients with glaucoma. We have patients that we’re the first line of defense. So if we don’t do a good job of [inaudible 00:03:06] and teaching our patients what dry eye disease looks like and what the symptoms are, then we can miss a lot of things including even something like a pass down of the disease of Sjogren’s. We know how dangerous that is because those patients unrecognized are much more likely to get lymphoma. So I think there’s such a huge opportunity for private practitioners to really embrace this and set themselves apart. Whitney Hauser :The education, as I asked that question was really kind of directed at how does education play a role with the patient directly? But really there’s almost two different ways that you can see that question. I think that you sort of embraced both angles of it, which is one, we’re educating the patient in dry eye disease about all the things that optometry can offer to them even if they’re not highly symptomatic. I think that’s an important piece because when you

Having a clinical protocol in place can make the journey of clinical decision-making and consistency so much clearer. Whitney Hauser, OD, now director of clinical affairs at Keplr Vision, talks about the ways that developing and using a clinical protocol for dry eye and other ocular conditions can help.

Whitney Hauser: Hi, I’m Dr. Whitney Hauser with Dry Eye Coach podcast and we welcome today Dr. Tal Raviv, Founder and Medical Director of the Eye Center of New York. Welcome, doctor. Tal Raviv: Thanks for having me. I’m a fan of your podcast. Whitney Hauser: Oh, very good. Very good. Thanks so much. We really enjoy doing them and we rely on experts like yourself to provide us some content and clarity on a lot of interesting issues in dry eye disease. Today we’re going to be talking about dry eye treatment pre and post cataract surgery. And this, I know, is impactful for our patients and for our practices both in optometry and ophthalmology. So we’re just gonna kind of get the ball rolling here in a few minutes with some questions, but is there anything just sort of off the top of your head that comes to mind about pre and postop for eye disease that listeners need to consider? Tal Raviv: I think we’ll get into the conversation, but certainly the fact that we have a whole podcast on this just highlights the importance of it and we’ll get into why that is, and it’s an issue that I talk about every day. In fact, my last patient today was someone who was post op with dry eye, and we got into this conversation. The more we speak with them before, the better prepared we are to speak with them after. Whitney Hauser: Right, right. I think we’ve all heard that before. You know, it’s your fault if it happens afterwards. Otherwise, if you’ve diagnosed on the front end, you know, it’s really something that the doctor and patient really try to conquer together. Tal Raviv: Exactly. Whitney Hauser: To kind of set the foundation, in the Trattler’s Landmark PHACO study that was published a few years ago, we found that about three quarters of patients presenting for cataract surgery had ocular surface disease and at least half have ocular surface problems that alter the results of biometry or could otherwise negatively affect surgical outcomes. So, like you said, there’s such an impact to the patient in terms of the numbers and in terms of their ultimate outcome with the surgery. I guess the first question really to kind of get things going is, those numbers are very large. So let’s talk about what they mean. What is the impact or what could dry eye have on the outcomes of cataract surgery if it went untreated? Tal Raviv: Well, I think that study, the PHACO study, was really a great paper in documenting what many of us already know, but actually documenting even worse than what we thought. He found up to 78 percent, and, you know, I think Dr. Gupta had a study that found up to 80 percent of patients coming in for cataract surgery, had some signs and symptoms of dry eye disease. Now, how does it affect us? It impacts cataract surgeons in three ways. Not the surgeons, but patients and then their conversations with their surgeons, that is. Number one, as you mentioned, is getting poor biometry or keratometry which is a key part of our calculations. Keratometry is exquisitely sensitive to dryness and if we don’t pay attention to that, the studies have shown – Alice Epitropoulus has great study showing as well – that with high osmolarity, we’re likely to have an error in our biometry. So that’s a very specific, long lasting effect on those patients — they end up with a refractive error that we don’t desire. Number two is that dry eye signs, such as punctate kerotopathy and corneal staining also have a negative effect on the visual quality, so if we place an advanced technology lens, such as a presbyopic IOL in the patient and they revert back to their worn out cornea that’s dry, they’re going to have poor visual outcome. They won’t see far

In this encore OIS Podcast, well-known Dry Eye Coach discusses some of the strategies she’ll be sharing next month at OIS@SECO. Dr. Hauser will help lead off next month’s program at OIS@SECO. In this encore OIS Podcast, Dr. Hauser shares her insights on new dry eye treatments and offers advice for building an eye care practice through social media.

Whitney Hauser, OD, has built a very visible brand as the Dry Eye Coach. With a website, podcasts, and sizable following on social media, she is building a platform that can help promote new treatments and fellow eye care providers. In this podcast, Dr. Hauser discusses new technology that can help treat patients. But she also shares how social media can help build and maintain a practice.

Whitney Hauser, OD, has built a very visible brand as the Dry Eye Coach. With a website, podcasts, and sizable following on social media, she is building a platform that can help promote new treatments and fellow eye care providers. In this podcast, Dr. Hauser discusses new technology that can help treat patients. But she […]

you were putting together a Who’s Who list of optometric leaders in ocular surface disease, Dr. Whitney Hauser would undoubtedly make the cut. In addition to masterminding the launch of the TearWell Advanced Dry Eye Treatment Center at the Southern College of Optometry where students get dedicated ocular surface disease clinical hours, she launches the […]

Whitney Hauser, OD, speaks with Gary Wörtz, MD, to address some unanswered questions regarding dry eye disease. Listen as Dr. Hauser discusses her efforts to improve physicians' understanding of this condition and learn about Dry Eye Coach-an educational resource for ophthalmologists and optometrists seeking information on the ocular surface.

Whitney Hauser, OD, speaks with Gary Wörtz, MD, to address some unanswered questions regarding dry eye disease. Listen as Dr. Hauser discusses her efforts to improve physicians' understanding of this condition and learn about Dry Eye Coach-an educational resource for ophthalmologists and optometrists seeking information on the ocular surface.