What ODs and MDs learned outside their specialties at EyeCon 2025

Ophthalmologists and optometrists met to discuss the latest and greatest in eye care during the EyeCon 2025 conference in Hollywood, Florida. Running from September 26-27, the conference held CE for a variety of different specialties, from dry eye to refractive surgery. ODs and MDs alike spoke with the Eye Care Network to reflect on what pearls they learned outside of their specialty that they will take home and add to their day-to-day skillsets.

"I was just sitting in a lecture with Dr Jade Coats and Dr Rahul Tonk, and it was really amazing to hear their kind of on the ground opinions and different I guess, how they work their clinics, and how they talk to patients and approach things like IOL selection," said Alison Bozung, OD, FAAO. "That's not something that I generally do. So for me, it was really cool to hear them talk through that. And even though I don't do it on a day-to-day basis, it would be something that's really nice to know, because I do still refer patients for cataract surgery, right? And it's important to be able to talk with them ahead of time about what to expect. So I think that's a really cool a really cool piece."

"As an ophthalmologist, I love attending collaborative conferences with both optometrists and ophthalmologists to understand how both sides are coming together to take care of our patients," said Rahul Tonk, MD, MBA. "And I learned a lot of great pearls today on scleral contact lens fitting, what the points of failure are that make patients reject contact lenses, how those can be optimized by management of the ocular surface, by improving fitting parameters, by using different types of fitting technologies. And I think that'll be great for the corneal practice that I have to work a little bit more closely and collaboratively with the fitters and the optometrist in my area."

"Some key takeaways that I've picked up just from the earlier sessions here, especially in the side of corneal management, of surgical surgical management," said Joseph Allen, OD, FAAO, Dipl ABO. "There's some procedures and even IOLs that I didn't fully understand or know that were either out now or coming out. And so learning those kind of nuances of how I can better assess my patients in doing a handoff to the corneal specialist when the patient really needs that extra care. I think that's a big take away from myself."

"One of the really nice things for me was that I sat through a lecture here about all of the new micro stents in glaucoma that are available," said Thomas A. Albini, MD. "And as a retina specialist, it's been in practice for two decades. I've kind of missed all of that. I don't go-to many glaucoma meetings, and so I think meetings like this are always very nice to get kind of an idea of what's going on in other fields and things that you may not be up to date with you."