Unleash your practice’s equipment by changing your mindset

The views expressed here belong to the author. They do not necessarily represent the views of Optometry Times or UBM Medica.

One thing that we always liked about our mentors is that they never looked at a problem from just one angle. With consistent frequency, we alter our attention to view something a new way.

That is the reason why Pacific University has always stayed at the forefront of custom contact lens innovation.

So how do we bring this mindset into clinical practice?

Here are a couple ideas with topography and optical coherence tomography (OCT) to help get you thinking outside the box.

Related: How a blue ocean strategy can keep you competitive

Topography

Have you ever mistakenly taken a topo over the top of the lenses and thought, crap what is this going to tell us? Well, it can tell you a lot.

We frequently look at how topographies look after we fit patients into their lenses. For multifocal lenses it can tell us how the centration of the optics relates to the line of sight. Sometimes we do topography over scleral lenses to see why there might be any residual toricity on the surface of the lens.

There are a ton of other applications available and I’d love to hear some of what you are doing.

OCT

We all know that OCT is for posterior segment, but we use ours for far more than just the posterior. We also use it for the anterior segment as well.

Some of the newest OCT equipment even have anterior segment software for things like scleral lens fitting (Optovue). Some vendors are even coming out with specific applications for biometry (Heidelberg, not yet available in U.S.).

Related: 5 steps for better contact lens wear

You are even able to gather images of meibomian glands on one of the OCTs (Heidelberg).

We have other instruments that help us in ways other than they were intended. We would love to hear how you use some of them in your practice.

Either comment below, or tweet @davekading.

Read more from Dr. Brujic and Dr. Kading here