AAO logo reflects committment to patient care

“Protecting Sight. Empowering Lives,” reads the tagline under the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s new logo. It is both a mission statement and a rebranding effort that reflects a shift in AAO strategy. The aim is sharpening the professions’ focus on delivering value in patient care – and communicating that value in terms the public and policy makers can readily understand.

“As the Academy has become the public face of our profession it is essential that our brand reflect our real commitment to improving the lives of our patients,” AAO President Russell N Van Gelder MD, PhD told the opening session of the AAO 2015 Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, USA. Effectively communicating the value patients gain from eye care services has also become a financial issue in the US, where both public and private insurers increasingly base reimbursement on quality and patient outcomes rather than the quantity of services rendered.

“Decisions are made every day by politicians and policy makers that rock our world. If we don’t project our value in the most accurate and effective way possible, we are fighting with only one hand. And if we subsequently don’t deliver that value, we are not meeting our obligations as physicians,” said AAO CEO David W Parke II MD.

Among the tools AAO provides to help ophthalmologists meet their patient service obligations are its educational programs and the Intelligent Research in Sight, or IRIS, ophthalmic registry. Just two years after its launch IRIS already contains 61 million encounter records of more than 17 million patients, making it the world’s largest specialty clinical registry, Dr Parke noted.

IRIS directly supports patient care improvement by providing individual ophthalmologists with performance and benchmarking data, as well as global treatment and outcomes information needed for improving population health. It also has enabled ophthalmologists to capture more than $300 million in performance-based incentives embedded in the US Medicare insurance program for older adults and the disabled. As part of its refocus, AAO has also brought all its online operations and publications for both physicians and patients under unified leadership, Dr Parke said.

Increasingly, AAO speaks not only for US ophthalmologist, but for the international eye care community as well, said AAO President-Elect William L Rich III MD, FACS. One-third of AAO members now practice outside the US in 151 countries, he noted.

Citing recent changes in US payment policy that, among other things, discourage treatment of complex retinal and glaucoma cases, Dr Rich emphasized the need to for organized ophthalmology to engage governments and policy makers with the facts of how their actions affect patient care. “Never has there been a greater dissociation of health policy from economic and clinical reality.”

Still, Dr Rich, who takes over as AAO president in January, is optimistic. “Like every successful organization, AAO has a unique culture. Ours is defined by education, quality improvement and education.” As it has in decades past, the profession will overcome economic and policy challenges by embracing these values to provide better patient care.