Vision Expo East 2024: Technological advancements and excellence in treatment collide

For some eye care providers, the sheer amount of technological innovation available for treating patients may be overwhelming. Laura Periman, MD, talks through modern treatment options as an opportunity to get specific and passionate, as well as what role Vision Expo East 2024 plays in showcasing these new developments.

Video transcript

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

Laura Periman, MD:

Hi everyone, Laura Periman, Seattle, Washington. I'm the founder and director of Dry Eye Services and Clinical Research at the Periman Eye Institute in Seattle, Washington. We're here at Vision Expo East, the last year that it's going to be in New York City at the Javits Center. But I'm also here to continue to learn and continue to share with our colleagues, we had 2 fantastic sessions this morning, 1 on ocular surface disease complex cases, the other 1 on dry eye disease (my favorite topic), and we have a lot of fun talking about all the innovations that are coming about.

I think 2024 is going to continue to show us wonderful innovations and strides for our patients, learning as a community, best tools to use when and where, what situations, really learning from each other best critical practices; how to take advantage of all these incredible technologies, pharmacologics that we have available for us. When you come to a meeting, like this with Vision Expo, where you have nuts and bolts, beautiful equipment, advanced therapeutics, diagnostics, devices for treating, I think you walk away with a sense of renewed interest and passionate engagement with what you're doing Monday through Friday in the clinical lane. And the power it gives you to say to your patients that you're encountering next week, "I just saw this really interesting innovation at this convention that I was at this past weekend and I want to tell you a little bit about it." That kind of continuing education, integrating it into our everyday clinical practices, advanced learning, are really, I think, the cornerstones that keep us engaged as lifelong learners and doctors who really want the very best for our patients.

I think, for our colleagues out there, they get a little overwhelmed, maybe, at all of the innovations that we have in dry eye, I have good news for you: what's happening is we're gaining specific tools for specific jobs. So instead of just treating general categories of things, we now have direct arrows from the quiver that we can pull for exact clinical situations. That's empowering. Now we can untangle that ball of yarn that's each individual dry eye patient's clinical scenario, with precision, with mindfulness, with even more excellence than ever before.