Through its enterprise partnership with Apple, IBM will create a clinical calculation app for cataract surgeons for eye care company Bausch + Lomb, a subsidiary of Valeant Pharmaceuticals, the companies announced this morning.
“If you think about all the mobile solutions throughout the industry and what we do as consumers, we needed to carry that forward and make it easier for our surgeons, and ultimately get better results for our patients,” Andy Chang, SVP and general manager of US Surgery for Bausch + Lomb, told MobiHealthNews. “This was an area where we knew we could improve in a big way and fundamentally change the way surgeons operate within cataract surgery.”
Cataract surgery requires surgeons to remove a clouded lens in a patient’s eye and replace it with an artificial lens, called an intraocular lens or IOL. But since very patient’s eye is different, the process of selecting the right IOL requires a lot of calculations, which are currently done mostly on paper. Bausch + Lomb makes an FDA-cleared calculator, but its not integrated with any other part of the process.
“Right now what surgeons are doing is they use a machine to take a diagnostic, they take biometry of the eye, they take that data set, they print it out, and they go back and calculate which implant to utilize for that patient,” Chang said. “During that process they’re making a lot of calculations. It’s all manual, it’s not automated. So really the driving force is ‘how do we make that process a lot easier and then have less room for error?’”
At first the app will serve to integrate all the calculation data, patient data, and records of previous surgeries to generally make cataract surgeons’ work more efficient. But the app is being designed in such a way as to incorporate IBM’s cognitive computing capabilities in the future.
“IBM works closely with companies to deliver a mobile experience that transforms how professionals work across industries, and we look forward to bringing the benefits of mobile technology to some of the world’s busiest surgeons – cataract surgeons,” Mahmoud Nagshineh, general manager of the Apple partnership at IBM, said in statement. “Bausch + Lomb has identified a significant need in the ophthalmic community, and the app we created will equip ophthalmologists with the data they need at their fingertips to help them make better, informed decisions for their patients.”
Chang says that while they hope the app will reduce surgical error, the big draw is the efficiency play in an area that has a shortage of surgeons and a surge in patients.
“There’s a little bit of a swell coming through,” he said. “We have the baby boomers and everyone else, this swell of cataract patients is going to come through. Right now there are about 4 million cataracts in the US, over 20 million worldwide. There’s a trend where less and less surgeons are coming out but there are more and more patients who need the help. So you can imagine where each surgeon will have to do more in the subsequent years, how do we make this more efficient? It’s not a crisis, it’s not a problem, but you can see where there’s a little bit of a bottleneck in terms of the patients that need the care and the surgeons that are available.”
IBM and Apple also made news earlier this week when IBM's Watson Health unit announced that it would offer up to a terabyte of data storage for three years to anyone running a study on Apple's ResearchKit, for free.
