Eye Care on the Information Superhighway

BY JOSEPH T. BARR, O.D., M.S., EDITOR
NOV. 1996

What do The American Academies of Optometry and Ophthalmology, the American Optometry Association, Vistakon, Polymer Technology Corp. and some of your colleagues have in common? Many things, you say. They all need patients, they all need to get their message out, and they all need to be 'with it' in the latter part of the 20th century. And one more thing ... they all have sites on the World Wide Web.

Yesterday, one of our optometry gurus in Ohio told me about his O.D.-wife's Web site. It reminded me to check with my staff to see how many of our patients had indicated that they'd heard about our clinical services via The Ohio State University's Web site. (Hopefully, many of you know that we do more at OSU than play football.) Oh sure, you may say, far fewer than half of your patients have access to the World Wide Web. But how many more patients would you have if you had a Web site?

Let me tell you about one patient recruitment success story. Over the last two years, as the Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Keratoconus (CLEK) Study was launched, Chairman Dr. Karla Zadnik enlisted the talents of Dr. Mark Bullimore to create a Web site to inform the world about the study (http://spectacle.berkeley.edu/CLEK).

The CLEK home page provides a brief description of keratoconus and of the CLEK study, and it lists the locations of the participating clinics. It also includes links to the Web sites for the National Eye Institute and the National Institutes of Health. Several eye-related Web sites provide links to the CLEK Study page as well. If a patient searches for 'keratoconus,' he or she will find the CLEK home page.

Over a 40-day period in 1995, the CLEK home page was visited 399 times. More motivated visitors probably went to the CLEK Clinics page which was visited 168 times. There were 153 commercial users (e.g., America Online) and 57 visitors from outside the United States. Sixty-nine inquiries were from universities, 21 were from government e-mail addresses and eight were from organizations. Eighty-six visitors' home bases could not be identified. Between June 26 and Nov. 27, 1995, the study chairman contacted 33 interested patients and potential referring doctors by e-mail. Of the 1,210 patients who enrolled, at least 30 came to us by way of the Internet.

It may not work for all practices, but some will definitely benefit from using this worldwide billboard. Soon, every large company in our industry will have a Web page. Continuing education on the Internet will surely grow as well. Clearly, many of us have already benefited from Internet communications to help one another solve patient care problems. There's no doubt that sending messages and images will make diagnosis and management more efficient in the future. We just need to sort out the economics and make the Internet easier to use. Equipping and training staff to use the new technology will be critical to our future needs.

Oh don't worry, if you don't know how to get started on the Internet, just ask your son or daughter or some other student. It's a breeze for them. CLS