Live from the 2024 AAO Annual Meeting, Nathan Radcliffe, MD, gave an overview of a panel discussion he participated in, titled, “Navigating the Business of Glaucoma.”
Dr. Radcliffe:
We recently did a session on the business of glaucoma. It was fun and it was something different. What we focused on in this session is my belief and the panel’s belief that taking good care of glaucoma patients should also be good for the health of your practice from a business standpoint. But there are challenges. The challenges we face are lots of patients with and diverse needs within those patients. Growing the glaucoma business is really about giving your patients a good experience and helping them get access to good technology. There’s a lot of amazing technology now that provides a wonderful patient experience, so your happy patients are your ambassadors for your practice. You have to learn a few things about how to use the technology you have. You have to understand billing and coding.
You have to think about the most efficient ways to run your practice. We have a lot of demands on us, a lot of tests to do, a lot of different things we need to know about our patients, and finding an efficient way to get those things done helps us take good care of people. This can start with diagnostics and the patient experience, how we educate our patients. There are a lot of interesting things. We talked a little bit about virtual perimetry and how that’s helping us streamline our patient experience. Then it comes into the technologies we offer. Laser is one of those evolving technologies. SLT or DSLT, which is now available, provides an incredible patient experience. It helps them with their glaucoma and it’s good for the practice as well. But using eye drops intelligently, making sure your patients get good value out of their insurance and finding the medicines that are the best in class and covered for them, is good.
It’s also notable that when brand name drugs are used, those are the companies that are investing in new technologies, the things that we like as surgeons, stents, drug delivery, new MIGS procedures, and so on. We talked a little bit about sustained drug delivery. We have Durysta in the office and now iDose in the operating room. These are a little different. They’re buy-and-bill, so there are some upsides to the technologies, but you have to learn a little bit about how the coding works, how reimbursement works, using these products intelligently. But when we do all of these things together, standalone MIGS, MIGS with cataract surgery, appropriate use of laser and drug delivery, we can deliver a fantastic patient experience and we can do it in a way that keeps our practice healthy, where we get the reimbursement that’s appropriate for the things that we’re delivering, and we can grow our practice while making our patients happy. Overall, it’s a good thing for everyone. We are in a remarkable time where we have great technology that we can bring to our patients and [I’m] thankful just to be a part of it.
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