AAO 2023: Caring for glaucoma patients with the Heidelberg SPECTRALIS

Swarup Swaminathan, MD, spoke with Ophthalmology Times about using the Heidelberg SPECTRALIS and caring for our Glaucoma patients at this year's American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting.

Video Transcript

Editor's note - This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Swarup Swaminathan, MD:

Hi everybody. My name is Swarup Swaminathan, and I'm an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, Florida, and I'm a Glaucoma specialist. I'm happy to share how I enjoy using the SPECTRALIS, Heidelberg SPECTRALIS and caring for our Glaucoma patients.

Many times, I think with our patients, it's really important to be able to share, you know, what we're looking at as clinicians and how we interpret that data in order to make our assessments of how their glaucoma is doing or if it's worsening, or if it's stable. And so, our ability to utilize the software that provides us a tremendous amount of data and be able to share that with our patients, by our side can be really, really empowering to the patient. So, they're able to understand how their disease is doing. So with the SPECTRALIS, it's really valuable to be able to share a variety of different scans, whether it's from looking at the optic nerve head to the macula, and really being able to show a patient, for example, how are their scans today, compared to the last time we saw them, and really demonstrating side by side how they're, hopefully, doing- doing the same, or if, perhaps there's any change, where is it occurring. And that really is empowering to the patient. Many have shared with me that they enjoy hearing that and seeing that because it really helps emphasize them, why it's important to be, you know, adherent to their therapy, why coming to their appointments are really important, and really ensuring that all aspects of their care are optimized. And so, really being able to utilize the software and being able to share those scans with the patient is really important and essential to clinical care.