The UK's prestigious Moorfields Eye Hospital has leap frogged into a virtual world by piloting a brand new application for Apples iPad that will develop and help run a virtual glaucoma clinic.
As patients of glaucoma often have to make check up visits to their eye specialist it is designed to reduce the number of often inconvenient trips and thereby allow a few more minutes back into the working day of the already stretched glaucoma specialists.The application has been developed by the hospital's OpenEyes team, Charing Systems and Black Pear software and was assisted by an NHS grant fund of £75,000 ( the NHS Connecting for Health's Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) Information Sharing Challenge Fund (ISCF).
Patient records are able to be collated by staff that are not necessarily able to make a management level decision, with the actual decision choice being made in the virtual clinic by the patients consultant.
The hospital identified a need for such a clinic a long time back but has been waiting for the technology to advance the idea.