AAO 2024: Office based surgery

John Josephson, MD, from the Eye Specialists and Surgeons of Northern Virginia, shared insights on office-based surgeries and how it allows for the addition of new technologies and new procedures at this year's AAO meeting held in Chicago, Illinois.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

John Josephson, MD:

Hi. My name is John Josephson from Eye Specialists and Surgeons of Northern Virginia. We're in Fairfax. Really excited to be at the Academy meeting this year where we're talking a lot about office space surgery. We've been doing office space surgery since 2022 we've done over 1500 cases. What's really exciting is that we've been able to now offer new technologies, bring new things to our area, because we control the place where we do the surgeries. So we brought in bilateral surgeries for cataract and for refractive lens exchange. We've been able to do new cornea procedures. So we were the first in our area to bring SeaTac, which is cornea tissue addition keratoplasty, which has been an exciting technology where we're able to take patients with keratoconus and improve their topographies by six to 10 and even more, diopters, we're able to improve their uncorrected and corrected visual outcomes.

So just bringing all this new technology, because we have everything at the forefront within our office. Has this been a dream come true? So, you know, in an office based surgical suite, the surgery is the same. We're still performing the same procedure. They're less sedation, which actually, in my opinion, is a positive patients aren't overly sedated, unresponsive, unable to help you look to the direction that you want them to be in. Patient Experience is a whole different ballgame. Patients are comfortable. They are able to come to the surgery. They don't have to be NPO. They don't have to get extensive testing beforehand. So they have this premium experience where they're coming in for an experience just like LASIK surgery or some of the other procedures that we do in our office.

So it just changes the whole ballgame. It takes it away from being a scary surgical procedure to having an office based procedure. So patient eligibility is a question that we're often asked about office space surgery. The criteria has kind of shifted over time. Initially we were very selective. Patients had to be a certain type of surgery, age health. Now that we've become more comfortable with the procedure, patients with a little bit more complexities in their eyes, you know, some floppy, floppy iris or more dense cataracts, we're comfortable doing, you know, we still want to make sure that their health is good. So a lot of patients will still get hmps or EKGs to make sure that they are healthy and appropriate for surgery. Obviously, any instability in their health, we're still going to take them to a surgical center. But for the most part, patients will choose where they want to have surgery, rather than us choosing it for them. And most patients will choose to have their surgery done in the office.