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NEW YORK—Gary Chu, OD, MPH, FAAO, vice president, professional affairs, New England College of Optometry and Susy Yu, OD, MBA, FAAO, director of business strategy and operations support, Vision Essentials by Kaiser Permanente are accomplished optometrists and public health experts. They discussed the need to expand access to vision care, especially for underserved populations, and the vital role that new technologies are playing in that process.



Dr. Gary Chu (l) and Dr. Susy Yu discussed the need to expand access to vision care, especially for underserved populations, and examined the vital role that new technologies are playing in that process.



Dr. Chu spoke about why it’s important to balance public health and health care delivery. He pointed out that 350 million people live in the U.S., but only half the people who need glasses are receiving them. Additionally, of the 120 million eye exams done in the U.S. each year, only 16 million to 20 million are eye health exams. Yet the American Optometric Association estimates that 200 million people need eye exams.

“We are not meeting this need. Clearly there is a gap,” said Dr. Chu. “Uncorrected refractive error is on the rise, and we need to think differently.”

Asked how Kaiser Permanente is working to improve access to vision care for its 12 million members, Dr. Yu replied, “We have to manage staff and equipment to optimize the resources that we have in order to deliver that care. It’s really about providing the right level of care to the right patient at the right interval.”

For example, she said that not every physical annual exam requires an MRI and not every routine eye exam requires a dilation. “What if it’s a patient that we just saw the day before? Or what if it’s a patient we just saw the month before and had routine findings or six months before?

“At some point you have to draw a line, and we use clinical evidence and clinic clinical data in order to create those guidelines. We have to maximize the resources that we have, the people and equipment, in order to deliver that care, and technology is a big part of that,” Dr. Yu said.

She noted that patients today expect to receive care in a way that is convenient for them, something that new technologies such as Plenoptika’s QuickSee, a handheld binocular open view wavefront aberrometer, are able to provide.

“You can take it anywhere, such as a pop-up clinic,” she said. “You can use it in pretesting if you don’t have enough space. You can use it to get baseline refractive prescription information. We want to engage those patients and have more connection points, so we use technology tools in order to do so.”

Dr. Chu agreed that technology is essential for expanding eyecare and health care. “We’re having a maldistribution of care, so we need to leverage technology and use it wisely,” he said. “We need to think about whether some of the care that we provide is transactional.

“Maybe we don’t even have to provide care sequentially or maybe it can be aggregated. We can leverage technology at different times to increase the number of touch points with the patient. Then the practitioner can have more thoughtful conversations.”