St. Joseph's Healthcare System

Michael D. DeLisi, MD, Chairman of Family Medicine, St. Jospeh's Regional Medical Center, is here to present useful health information related to diabetes.

Diabetes is the leading cause of visual problems and blindness in the United States. Routine screening for retinopathy is recommended for patients with diabetes. It has been well researched and reported that early care for diabetic retinopathy saves sight. There are far more diabetics in need of retinopathy screening than there are ophthalmologists to do the required screenings.

Most of the screenings do not result in findings requiring further care from an ophthalmologist. We needed to develop processes to accomplish the needed screening in a cost effective way that spares the ophthalmologists for the patients who actually need their care.

To address this problem here at St. Joseph's family medicine at Clifton we have been researching the use of a non-mydriatic digital retinal camera to facilitate retinopathy screening for our patients with diabetes. We were fortunate to receive a St. Joseph's Foundation Grant to buy a digital retinal camera two years ago to begin our project.

With the outstanding cooperation of one of our ophthalmologists, Dr. Swati Parekh as our principle collaborator, we have screened more than 500 retinas with digital photos. We then analyzed the photos for pathology under a protocol developed in collaboration with Dr. Parekh, total accordance of the readings was the goal. To answer a simple set of questions, the question evaluated were: was the current photo normal, or did it require further more extensive evaluation by an ophthalmologist? There was a greater than 95% concordance proving our concept.

Our patients have therefore been able to receive timely screening in our center without the need to travel to other sites and to additional appointments, which has increased convenience to our patients and has increased our availability of ophthalmologic care for patients who need it.