Treatment and management of glaucoma patients can now be tracked in real time, following the launch of a new Glaucoma Registry by Save Sight Institute Australia. The Glaucoma Registry will allow clinicians to capture data to investigate the clinical effectiveness, cost effectiveness and safety of emerging treatments for glaucoma.
Save Sight Registries (SSR), developed by Professor Mark Gillies at Save Sight Institute (University of Sydney), provides researchers and clinicians around the world with the means to measure patients’ treatment outcomes efficiently and securely. Its webbased platform facilitates the collection, storage and analysis of quality data from routine clinical practice in ophthalmology, with the ultimate goal of facilitating best practice and improved patient outcomes.
SSR has more than a decade of experience in tracking the effectiveness of treatment in agerelated macular degeneration, and has more recently extended to diabetic macular edema, keratoconus and retinal vein occlusions. The dataset includes over 120,000 treatments, and this robust system for data capture has now been extended to glaucoma treatments.
Developed with assistance from an unrestricted educational grant from Glaukos Australia, the Glaucoma Registry will now enable treatment of glaucoma to be monitored by treating clinicians in public and private clinics.
Being able to easily track changes in vision and response to treatment can help patients become more engaged with their treatment journey
The system provides audit data for each clinician’s own practice, and also generates a patient graph that maps patient outcomes such as intraocular pressure, visual fields and OCT parameters over time. This can be used as a patient education tool to potentially improve patient adherence.
“Being able to easily track changes in vision and response to treatment can help patients become more engaged with their treatment journey,” said Dr. Mitchell Lawlor, Chief Investigator for the Glaucoma module. “This is particularly important for encouraging adherence – patients who struggle with this will be able to see the impact of missing treatment on their visual function. From the clinician perspective, one area of strength for the registry will be in assessing the safety and efficacy of the growing number of ‘minimally invasive’ glaucoma devices that are becoming available to glaucoma patients.”
SSR provide a statistical functionality to encourage doctors to anonymously audit their results against that of colleagues participating in the Registry. Level 2 RANZCO CPD points are available for clinicians entering at least 85 per cent of their selected eligible patients’ data into the system, reviewing the self-generated reports and implementing or driving change at practice level. This would include, for example, entering 85 per cent of minimally invasive glaucoma surgeries performed.
Dr. Lawlor said the new glaucoma module has been designed for ease of use and efficiency. “The system has been designed with the dynamics of busy clinics in mind so data points are kept to a minimum while still capturing key condition-specific markers.
“Experience with our other Registries demonstrates that doctors see real value from the data collected and the information it reveals, so many are prepared to enter retrospective patient data in order to get a clear picture of treatment over the years.”
Other treatment modules through SSR have been able to identify the treatment patterns that are most effective for treating individual conditions, and have presented these findings at international conferences and published these findings in leading international journals. The new glaucoma registry is also expected to contribute to the academic literature on best practice in glaucoma management.
With glaucoma increasingly managed through collaborative care arrangements, Dr. Lawlor said Save Sight Registries was also exploring opportunities to provide access to optometry.
