21st century retina care with Dr. Majcher

Carolyn Majcher, OD, Associate Clinical Professor at the Northeastern State University Oklahoma College of Optometry discusses how ODs who incorporate multimodal imaging into their practices enjoy heightened efficiency and improved quality of care.

Transcript

Brooke Beery: Hi, I am Brooke Beery with Optometry Times^® and I am joined today by Dr. Carolyn Majcher, associate clinical professor at the Northeastern State University Oklahoma College of Optometry. She is lecturing on 21st century retina care at the Vision Expo West conference and has done extensive research in retinal imaging and OCT angiography. Carolyn, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Dr. Carolyn Majcher, OD: Hi Brooke, it is such a pleasure to be here and thank you for the invite. As you mentioned, I am an associate professor and the director of residency programs at the Oklahoma College of optometry. I have been here about 2 years and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I graduated from Salus University, did a residency there and spent about 8 years in San Antonio teaching before I came to Oklahoma.

Beery: Wow, that is fantastic. And you are giving a talk at the conference, so what are some key points from your talk this year?

Dr. Majcher: Yeah, so I covered a little bit of management for major disease categories with regard to diabetic retinopathy, venous occlusion, central serous, but the real main focus was on multimodal imaging. Multimodal imaging incorporates wide field and ultra wide field fundus photography—that could be color, that could be fundus autofluorescence. It also covers some of my favorites like OCT and OCT angiography.
And so a lot of what I discussed in the lecture is how this multimodal imaging technology can help ODs diagnose disease earlier in order to get patients treatment exactly when they need it in order to preserve vision rather than trying to bring it back. OCT angiography is really important with regards to detecting early neovascularisation and diabetic retinopathy and even AMD and even central serous and other conditions, as well.

Beery: This sounds like a great lecture. What are some take home messages you have for ODS?

Dr. Majcher: Incorporate multimodal imaging into your practice. It is going to make your life so much easier in terms of efficiency. It is also going to improve your quality of care because you are going to be more accurate in your staging of diabetic retinopathy and truly become confident as to whether AMD is nonexudative, or exudative, neovascular or non-neovascular. It is going to give you a lot of confidence and I think just improve the workflow in your clinic and allow you to provide the highest quality of care to your patients possible.

Beery: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It was a pleasure.

Dr. Majcher: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.