Automation in Eye Care: Driving Forces and New Opportunities in Healthcare Delivery

With rising patient volumes, decreasing reimbursements, and a shortage of care providers, automation and digitization have become essential to prevent vision loss and enhance care delivery.

The pursuit of automation in eye care mirrors a broader historical trend of leveraging technological advancements to increase productivity and repeatability. From simple machines to sophisticated AI systems, the goal has always been to enhance efficiency and care quality. The eye care industry faces challenges such as decreasing reimbursements by insurers, increasing patient volumes, and a shortage of care providers.

Automation and digitization are not merely opportunities but necessities to prevent vision loss and improve care delivery. In this article, we will explore the impact of automation in eye care and look to the future to understand how we can extend the reach and impact of clinicians to deliver high-quality, high-volume, repeatable care anywhere.

Automation through the Ages

Forces Driving Automation in Eye Care

High Technician Turnover

Ophthalmic technicians play a vital role in eye care practices, handling tasks like data collection and patient coordination, which allows doctors to focus on patient health. However, technician turnover is alarmingly high, with some practices experiencing rates as high as 80–90%. On average, 25% of technicians leave within their first year, and 35% stay for less than two years. Burnout, low wages, and limited advancement opportunities contribute to this turnover, leading to inconsistencies in clinic workflow and patient care. Automated exams help standardize critical tasks, ensuring consistent, high-quality care regardless of technician experience.

Inconsistent Results

Manual and subjective data collection techniques often result in variability between patients, visits, and operators. When confronted with unexpected diagnostic results, eye care professionals (ECPs) must often question who collected the data before proceeding with treatment. Repeatability is the hallmark of a well-designed automated system. Automation has become integral to many aspects of the comprehensive eye exam, such as auto perimeter, auto tonometer, and auto-capture of OCT and fundus imaging. These devices are routinely operated by technicians, and the consistency of results is largely independent of the operator’s skill level.

Decreasing Reimbursements

While economic rewards may not be the primary motivation for entering medicine, balancing revenue and operating costs is essential to maintaining a high standard of care. Stagnant or decreasing reimbursements create pressure on clinics to increase patient volumes to compensate for reduced revenue. If not managed properly, this can lead to patient dissatisfaction and increased medical liability. Automation allows for more efficient data collection, freeing doctors to focus on patient care without sacrificing quality.

Too Many Patients, Not Enough Doctors

The aging population and the increasing prevalence of chronic eye diseases are driving up demand for eye care services, but there aren’t enough ECPs to meet this growing need. Without intervention, we risk an increase in preventable vision loss. Automation offers a solution by extending the reach of ECPs and enabling diagnostic data to be collected anywhere, with minimal training. This shift in the care delivery model is essential to ensuring a high standard of care, even as demand continues to rise.

Telemedicine and Beyond

The telehealth eye exam, also known as the virtual eye exam, leverages automation to enable the on-site technician to collect the comprehensive exam data for review and consultation with a remote ECP. However, there remain a handful of manual ancillary tests such as cover test, extraocular motility, and pupil testing that still require manual collection. Depending on the skill of the onsite technician, the consistency of collected data from these manual tests can vary significantly. The manual exams are either recorded for asynchronous (and time-intensive) review by the remote doctor, or the remote doctor may monitor the exam in real-time from a web camera. At best, the process is cumbersome and increases the margin of error, resulting in a decreased standard of care.

Heru Prime has completely automated and digitized much of the comprehensive eye exam, including glaucoma screening, Cover testing, Extraocular motility and Pupil testing, using a virtual reality headset, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and a bidirectionally-responsive onboard virtual technician. Now with Heru Prime, remote ECPs have access to highly sensitive and specific, repeatable, rapid, fully digitized ancillary testing for their onsite and remote patient examinations.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about how Heru can transform your private practice or telehealth solutions.