The App That Cuts Clinic Queues

The sheer volume of patients who need treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) can result in long waiting times – and for patients who need assessment of their disease progression to determine if another anti-VEGF injection may be required, too much of a wait could lead to an irreversible loss of visual function. Can the consumer healthcare revolution help solve the problem? Developers of a visual assessment app that offers patients the option to test their visual function at home, and send the results to their eye clinic for analysis, certainly think so.

MultiBit is an iPhone and iPad app that displays sets of test digits that are built up by varying numbers of pixels – the fewer the pixels, the greater the difficulty. The test task is for users to speak aloud what digits are displayed; when the test is completed, recorded answers are played back to allow self-scoring of results, which are automatically transferred to the patient’s caregiver. What’s the value of the app and other similar apps that are in development? Advocates of this approach hope that they will detect changes in visual function in a manner that can detect macular degeneration well before traditional visual acuity tests will spot it. “Our studies show that the apps are better than traditional examinations conducted in the clinic. It opens the possibility for apps to replace many patient visits and in this way, free up healthcare resources and reduce wait times,” claims the researcher behind Multibit, Christina Winther (1). That’s a big claim, but if proven correct, this self-monitoring revolution would certainly have a huge impact on ophthalmology practice management and patient quality of life.