21st Century Retinal Care with Dr Majcher

Carolyn Majcher, OD, Clinical Associate Professor at Northeastern State University Oklahoma College of Optometry, explains how ODs who integrate multimodal imaging into their practices benefit from increased efficiency and better quality of care.

Transcription

Brooke Beer: Hi I’m Brooke Beery with Optometry time^® and with me today is Dr. Carolyn Majcher, Clinical Associate Professor at Northeastern State University Oklahoma College of Optometry. She lectures on Retinal Care in the 21st Century at the Vision Expo West Conference and has done extensive research on retinal imaging and OCT angiography. Carolyn, thank you very much for speaking with me today.

Dr Carolyn Majcher, DO: Hi Brooke, it’s a pleasure to be here and thank you for the invitation. As you mentioned, I am an associate professor and director of residency programs at the Oklahoma College of Optometry. I have been here about 2 years and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I graduated from the University of Salus, did a residency there, and spent about 8 years teaching in San Antonio before coming to Oklahoma.

Beer: Wow, this is fantastic. And you are lecturing at the conference, so what are the highlights of your conference this year?

Dr Majcher: Yes, so I covered a bit of the management of major disease categories with regards to diabetic retinopathy, venous occlusion, central serosa, but the main focus was multimodal imaging. Multimodal imaging incorporates wide-field and ultra-wide field fundus photography, which could be color, which could be fundus autofluorescence. It also covers some of my favorites like OCT and OCT angiography.
And so a lot of what I discussed in the conference is how this multimodal imaging technology can help ODs diagnose disease earlier in order to get patients treated exactly when they need it so to preserve the vision rather than trying to bring it back. OCT angiography is really important when it comes to early detection of neovascularization and diabetic retinopathy and even AMD and even central serous and other conditions.

Beer: It sounds like a great conference. What are the take-home messages for ODS?

Dr Majcher: Integrate multimodal imagery into your practice. This will make your life easier in terms of efficiency. It will also improve the quality of your care, as you will be more precise in the staging of diabetic retinopathy and you will become truly confident about whether AMD is non-exudative, or exudative, neovascular or non-neovascular. It will give you a lot of confidence and I just think it will improve the workflow in your clinic and allow you to provide the best possible quality of care to your patients.

Beer: Well, thank you very much for speaking with me today. It was a pleasure.

Dr Majcher: My pleasure. Thank you for hosting me.