It was a pleasure to catch up with our Editorial Board member, Dr David Chang (University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA) who gave us his highlights from this year’s meeting, including the annual film festival.
David Chang was speaking at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, 5–8 May, 2023.
Question:
- What were your highlights from ASCRS 2023? (0:14)
Disclosures: David Chang is a consultant for RxSight.
Support: Interview and filming supported by Touch Medical Media. Interview conducted by Lisa Glass.
Filmed as a highlight of ASCRS
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Hi. This is David Chang from California in the United States.
What were your highlights from ASCRS 2023?
Well, one of the highlights for the ASCRS annual meeting is always the film festival.
This is something now incorporated into many ophthalmic meetings, but the original one and most still most prestigious was ASCRS.
And the grand prize winner is very coveted. It usually goes to some you know, game-changing innovation in terms of surgical techniques or technologies, for instance, the Imani technique for interest global haptic fixation first debuted as the winner of the twenty sixteen ASCRS film festival. So, the winner this year went to Drs Venkatesh and Vina from the Arab of an eye hospital for their film on sustainability.
And I thought this was remarkable for the judges of all the, there are more than one hundred and fifty films submitted to highlight sustainability as the Grand Prize winner. So if you simply Google the ASCRS 2023 film festival you’ll be able to see the entire film festival with it. If you wanna watch that film just fast forward, to the very end to watch their ten-minute video.
As we have at each of the major meetings, AAO, ESCRS and now ASCRS, we held a workshop with industry leaders, from all the main surgical manufacturers along with our EyeSustain group. And these workshops have been really valuable. We’re looking for ways that we can collaborate to improve sustainability. Manufacturers play a big role in this, obviously.
And it starts with the design of their products.
And some of the things that we’ve been working on are reducing the size of the IOL box by going to electronic instructions for use. We call it EIFUs.
Versus printed booklets, which are in every single IOL cartridge and IOL box.
They are looking at ways to reduce, say, with preloaded systems now, what about just preloading an IOL cartridge and using a reusable injector rather than throwing the whole thing out.
We’ve talked about more options for plastic face drapes so that we don’t have to put an entire a drape over the patient’s body.
And there are a number of neat ideas that industry actively is working on.
We can help as well. They face some real uphill battles we’re shocked to find out that if a manufacturer wants to decrease the amount of plastic in their packaging or or perhaps move to a more environmentally friendly form of packaging, often the regulatory agencies require them to revalidate the safety and efficacy of the device which is enormously expensive. And I think this is where medical societies, which are sort of financially neutral in the approval process can make the case to these regulatory agencies that listen, we have a climate crisis and you need to do what you can to facilitate rather than block and impede manufacturers from doing the responsible thing.
Subtitles and transcript are autogenerated
