Leveraging home-monitoring vision tech for urgent tele-ophthalmology appointments during COVID and beyond

由于COVID-19，所有常规面对面眼科护理预约都已暂停（包括医院眼科和社区眼镜店）。由于常规预约约占所有眼科保健预约的80%，并且在2019年眼科部门成为最繁忙的医院门诊专科，这对整个NHS和英国600万患有眼病的患者来说是一个重大干扰。眼力表是评估眼睛健康的一个基本方面，由眼科专家创立的OKKO是一家经过认证的软件医疗设备公司，该公司创造了在智能手机上提供这种技术的技术（使用图片，而不是字母，通过简单易用的视频游戏界面，由3岁的儿童和85岁的成年人共同开发！）。迄今为止，我们正在申请专利和ce认证的技术一直专注于成人慢性疾病。然而，NHS眼科预约的取消意味着现在儿科和紧急护理对该产品的需求巨大，因此我们一直在为此目的重新开发我们的核心技术。在家监测弱视（弱视）患者的视力我们的iOS产品在苹果设备上的技术工作已经接近完成，但我们迫切需要为三星和华为手机创建一个Android版本，以便公平地满足NHS的需求。此外，我们必须紧急创建一个自动化的“入职”程序，以便于在线注册。这意味着我们的技术团队规模将迅速扩大一倍，以构建必要的稳定和可扩展的平台。去年，英国国家医疗服务体系有786万眼保健预约，其中只有3.7%是通过远程医疗方式（通常是通过电话检查患者术后症状）就诊的。鉴于2019冠状病毒病，全面推广远程医疗现在至关重要，但限制因素是在家中准确测量视力的能力。OKKO正在申请专利的技术专门满足了这一需求，它的整合可以提高在COVID期间提供适当眼科护理的能力，并减轻日益积压的取消预约和社会距离持续影响的影响（即患有哮喘/糖尿病的医生可以在家中经营诊所）。通过正确的产品加速，到2020年底，我们的技术可用于将眼科的远程医疗提高到50%，并利用屏蔽的眼科专家。

Due to COVID-19, all routine face-to-face eye care appointments have been suspended (both in hospital ophthalmology and in community opticians). Since routine appointments comprise approximately 80% of all eye care appointments, and in 2019 eye units became the busiest hospital outpatient speciality, this is a major disruption for the NHS as a whole, and the 6 million patients in the UK who live with eye disease.The eye chart is a fundamental aspect of assessing eye health, and, founded by eye specialists, OKKO are a certified software medical device company that creates technology to provide this on smartphones (using pictures, not letters, via a simple, accessible video game interface that has been co-developed by children as young as 3 years old and adults up to 85 years!). Our patent-pending and CE-marked technology to date has been concentrating on chronic disease in adults. However, the cancellation of NHS eye appointments means that there's now huge demand for the product in paediatrics and also in urgent care, so we have been redeveloping our core tech for this purposes:1. Home-monitoring children's vision for those undergoing at-home patching treatment for lazy eye (amblyopia)2. For one-off urgent use during tele-ophthalmology video consultationsOur technical work is nearly complete for our iOS product on Apple devices, however we urgently need to create an Android version for Samsung and Huawei phones, in order to meet NHS demand in an equitable way. In addition, we must urgently create an automated 'on-boarding' procedure for easy registration online. This means quickly doubling the size of our tech team to build the necessary stable and scalable platform.Last year NHS England had 7.86 million eye care appointments, just 3.7% which were seen by tele-health means (usually a telephone call to check on the patient's symptoms post-surgery).Given COVID-19, a full roll-out of tele-health is now essential, but the limiting factor is the ability to accurately measure sight in the home.OKKO's patent-pending technology specifically meets this need, and it's integration could ramp up the ability to deliver proper eye care during COVID and mitigate the effects the growing backlog of cancelled appointments and the continued impact of social distancing (ie doctors with asthma/diabetes who are shielding could instead be running clinics from their home). With the correct product acceleration, our technology could be used to raise the tele-health in ophthalmology to 50% by late 2020 and utilise the eye specialists who are shielding.