Date: Nov 08, 2013 Author: Dennis Domrzalski Source: bizjournals (
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Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in American adults, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Diabetes-related vision loss can be prevented with regular checkups and treatment, but there's a hitch.
Patients in small towns and rural communities generally don't have access to the technology and doctors that can help them avoid sight loss. As a result, many of those patients never get regular, preventive checkups. And by the time they start to experience vision loss, it's too late.
Now, a combination of on-site care and telemedicine is changing that in New Mexico.
In the past two years, VisionQuest Biomedical LLC of Albuquerque has taken its $30,000 diagnostic eye cameras to rural areas of New Mexico and Texas to do retinal scans of diabetic patients. The digital pictures are stored in the cloud and reviewed by the firm's network of contract optometrists.
To some in the medical field, the results have been astounding.
"At least 50 percent have some form of disease in their eyes. About 20 percent have signs of hypertension and cardiovascular disease and 25 to 30 percent have some form of diabetic retinopathy," said VisionQuest President and CEO Peter Soliz.
"These people are generally not under any kind of managed health care system" and so their conditions most likely would have gone undetected were it not for VisionQuest's eye scans, Soliz added.
"We have gone from Silver City to Taos, and we have crisscrossed the state," he said. "If we come across a severe case it is immediately referred to a full-fledged doctor."
For Dr. Dale Alverson, medical research director of the Center for Telehealth and Cybermedicine Research at the University of New Mexico Hospital, VisionQuest's results are remarkable.
"In Las Cruces they gathered together 200 patients with diabetes for retinal scans. Those patients did not have access to eye specialists and had not received evaluations," Alverson said.
"What they found was that 40 percent of those patients needed referrals, and not just for diabetic retinopathy, but for glaucoma and cataracts. The compelling part of the story is that 10 of those 200 patients had sight-threatening problems that meant that without immediate intervention they would go blind."
The good news is that those patients were screened and treated and at least 10 cases of blindness were prevented, Alverson said.
The bad news is that Medicaid and Medicare, the federal government health care programs for the elderly and children, "will not pay for that screening," Alverson said.
"Yet if those patients had gone blind they would have qualified for disability. We are working with" federal and state officials to explore ways the two programs can fund such preventive treatment, Alverson added.
