EnVision Summit 2025: What you missed in keratoconus, AI, and comanagement

From February 14-17, ophthalmic and optometric professionals gathered at EnVision Summit 2025. Besides soaking up the Puerto Rican sun, ODs shared their expertise on keratoconus, myopia, glaucoma, and everything in between. The Eye Care Network sat down with OD Envision faculty members to hear their insights during the meeting.

Sherrol Reynolds, OD, FAAO, weighed in on what she thinks will be the biggest innovations to come in eye care.

"Artificial intelligence will really revolutionize the eye care industry: the ability to detect early, diagnose early, and intervene earlier in our patients," Reynolds said. "Having instrumentation not only in the eye care practice, but I see some of these devices in primary care physicians offices, and we could get these patients the next level of care sooner rather than later. Again, the whole goal is to preserve sight, and I think for me as an optometrist and my colleagues as an optometrist, we just play an important role. It's not just about seeing for our patients: it's preserving their sight. So if we can better, detect earlier, detect changes, and then get those patients to our colleagues, the retinal specialist, I think that it's a win for the patient. It's a win for the profession."

Ashley Wallace Tucker, OD, FAAO, FSLS, said she is looking forward to seeing more treatments for corneal ectasias.

"I mainly in my practice focus on interior segment disease. I have a passion for keratoconus and fitting specialty contact lenses," she said. "So what I would love to see are more treatments for patients that have these ectasias. I know we have corneal transplants and those sorts of things, but patients are really desiring vision rehabilitation. They really would like an alternative, sometimes, to contact lenses. And I have so many patients that want to wear contacts but can't, so to have technology that would allow those types of patients to be free from contact lenses, like some sort of refractive procedure that would be suitable for patients that have keratoconus or other ectasia. I would love to see that, and that would really impact my patient base."

Jessica Steen, OD, FAAO, finds comanagement is a vital part of successful patient care in glaucoma management.

"I was fortunate to be able to have with my colleagues, Dr James Murphy, Dr Mary Qiu, and Dr Rachel Simpson, 3 glaucoma surgeons practicing in very different environments really centered around how we best comanage and take care of our glaucoma patients through their lifetime," Steen said of a talk she gave with the MDs. "Now, of course, we talked about new therapeutics, thinking about how we choose a therapeutic based on mechanism of action and true efficacy and tolerability, and most importantly, how we think about interventional therapies, when to consider therapies surgical decision making and comanagement. I think it's conversations like this between optometrists and ophthalmologists that really allow us to get to the core of best patient management and best practices.

"You know, it even sparked a conversation yesterday to reach out again to a glaucoma surgeon locally in Fort Lauderdale, I realized it had been a number of months since we had touched base. We share a fair number of patients, and considering that we are in different physical locations, I wanted to ensure, and do want to ensure that we're carefully and correctly and actively co managing patients to the best of both of our abilities.

"The partnership in optometry and ophthalmology in managing patients really is something that we always need to keep in mind. You know, we really do rely on one another to take the best care of our patients, whether they are currently in our office, whether they are coming back to us from the ophthalmologist or treating physician. It's really about these careful and real, clear discussions to manage our patients again through their lifetime and course of disease."