Embracing New Technology in Eye Care
Julie Rodman, OD
The AdaptDx Pro® dark adaptometer helps eye care professionals, like Dr. Julie Rodman, to identify subclinical AMD in patients. This, in turn, allows her to make proactive treatment decisions that wouldn’t be possible without this early detection. Embracing new technology like this can help eye care professionals to preserve their patients’ vision for years to come.
Transcript:
Every profession has people that have trouble adopting and incorporating new technology and it’s no different with optometry. There are doctors that will say to me, “You know, I’ve been practicing for 30-40 years – why do I need to incorporate new technology into my practice? I’ve been taking excellent care of my patients. They’re doing fine.” So what’s the importance of this? And I like to say to them, “Let’s talk about AMD for a minute. If we were doing so well then why are so many people blind?” MacuLogix has recently introduced the AdaptDx Pro which has been mind-boggling – phenomenal to me! This new technology will hopefully cut that number in half or even better. It’s going to allow us to make early decisions that we wouldn’t see without it. I love to tell people, you know, we are missing things – missing that vascular piece – that structural OCT cannot provide. So I like to compare that to what the AdaptDx [Pro] does because without it, you’re missing an essential piece that we can’t see clinically.
It’s extremely difficult with dark adaptation testing to AMD at an early stage because patients come in – asymptomatic. Their clinical examinations are essentially unremarkable but yet there are things happening at that subclinical level that we’re missing. And it’s really sad because these patients have options and things we can do to help them if we were able to diagnose this at a subclinical level, we really would be helping these patients. It’s good to look at things from a different perspective and say we have a lot of things we can do better and perhaps, open your mind. Try it. Have a rep come out and play with it – see how you feel about it. The AdaptDx Pro is a huge innovation in the field of optometry – the portability, the ease-of-use, and the ability to allow optometrists to diagnose AMD at the subclinical stage is huge. I would say that this is one of the biggest innovations that we’ve had that’s really targeted to the optometric profession. And I think it’s going to allow us to make a mark on the world and to help treat and fight blindness [caused by AMD].