Source: nature .com

Purpose
Globally, 153 million people are visually impaired from uncorrected refractive error. The aim of this research was to verify a method whereby autorefractors could be used by non-specialist health-workers to prescribe spectacles, which used a small stock of preformed lenses that fit frames with standardised apertures. These spectacles were named S-Glasses (Smart Glasses).

http://bit.ly/RKgTNk

Source: medscape .com

Nonmigraine headache is associated with low levels of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin (OH) D, according to results from the sixth survey of the Norwegian Tromsø Study, Tromsø 6.

http://bit.ly/VTjaDT

Source: medscape .com

Only those physicians who received extensive, sustained, technical assistance with electronic health records (EHRs) had significant improvements in quality of care, according to a study published in the January issue of Health Affairs. This study of small physician practices in New York City also showed that quality improved only for a limited group of measures.

http://bit.ly/UEkklz

Source: readwrite .com

For several months now, Microsoft's Surface RT has stood as an example of Microsoft's commitment to the concept of a Windows tablet.
But in the next few weeks, Microsoft will begin shipping the full-fledged Windows 8 version of the device (officially known as Surface with Windows 8 Pro, and priced at $899) offering improved performance as well as full-fledged Windows 8 compatibility and functionality. ReadWrite received a behind-the-scenes look at the new tablet at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

http://bit.ly/V0M4Ue

Source: newsfromaoa .org

The American Board of Optometry (ABO) announced its board certification program has been accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) for a five-year period.

http://bit.ly/ZxjgC3

Source: engadget .com

Even though Microsoft doesn't have a booth at CES this year, that doesn't mean it skipped Vegas altogether. Panos Panay, the general manager for Surface products, is in town, holding meetings with a few members of the media, us included. And he brought some toys with him. Specifically, the forthcoming Surface Pro along with the pressure-sensitive pen that goes with it. We only had a few minutes of hands-on time and in any case, we plan on going into much more detail when we eventually write our review. For now, though, we've got a first look waiting for you past the break. Join us.

http://engt.co/U8baPT

Source: bbc .co.uk

Totally blind mice have had their sight restored by injections of light-sensing cells into the eye, UK researchers report.
The team in Oxford said their studies closely resemble the treatments that would be needed in people with degenerative eye disease.

http://bbc.in/TXi76p

Source: medpagetoday .com

Changes in blood vessels in the eye might be an early warning sign of glaucoma, researchers reported.

http://bit.ly/WufM1l

Source: kevinmd .com

There has been an explosion in health apps. Patients are using them for weight loss, calorie counting, exercise monitoring, ovulation calculation and for many other health needs. But to truly integrate the concept of health apps in the health care system healthcare providers will need to get involved. There is discussion in the health IT world lately regarding physician adoption of technology specifically mobile health apps, electronic record systems and patient portals. Doctors have now been plugged into the equation for technological innovation. This represents a paradigm shift for doctors. Life was much simpler when all we had was a pager and a stethoscope.

http://bit.ly/TQ9OJw

Source: gizmodo .com

The holidays are over but gag gifts can be forever. This medical alert bracelet ensures that doctors know how to treat you if you were to suffer a medical emergency. No, you're not allergic to anything. No, you don't have an emergency contact. You just need a professional to delete your browsing history. Let's face it, gag or no gag, we all need to wear this bracelet. [Reddit via BoingBoing]

http://bit.ly/ZnRagU

Source: kevinmd .com

The 21st century challenge for the American health care delivery system is to deliver higher quality care for less money. Republican and Democratic experts agree that payment reform involving transitioning from fee-for-service to global, value-based systems is necessary for us to achieve that goal. Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are the new entities that will receive the new global payments and distribute them to the doctors, allied health professionals, hospitals, and post-acute care facilities that care for the patients; Medicare ACOs are being piloted under provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Commercial ACOs are being developed by private insurance companies, hospitals, and physician groups.

http://bit.ly/UMHXed

Source: medgadget .com

For years, the beeper/pager has been the primary means of communicating secure messages between hospital staff and employees. In the age of smart phones and tablets, however, beepers seem to be an anachronism. Most only allow for short messages and necessitate a phone call to clarify the full nature of a patient’s situation. Nevertheless, due to privacy restrictions around HIPAA, it has proven difficult to transmit secure information across any other platform. Furthermore, any messaging platform would be held to a high standard, considering the consequences of a HIPAA violation.

http://bit.ly/UmJepM

Source: aaojournal .org

Objective
Elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) is a major risk factor for the deterioration of open-angle glaucoma (OAG); medical IOP reduction is the standard treatment, yet no randomized placebo-controlled study of medical IOP reduction has been undertaken previously. The United Kingdom Glaucoma Treatment Study (UKGTS) tests the hypothesis that treatment with a topical prostaglandin analog, compared with placebo, reduces the frequency of visual field (VF) deterioration events in OAG patients by 50% over a 2-year period.

http://bit.ly/XnnErh

Source: contactlensjournal .com

Purpose
To assess and compare the base curve (BC) of rigid gas permeable contact lens (RGP) that were calculated by FITSCAN using corneal topography (Orbscan IIz) and the diagnostic contact lens fitting method in keratoconus eyes.

http://bit.ly/UKQeQY

Source: newsfromaoa .org

An increasingly rare mix of Democrats and Republicans came together on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives late last night to approve a last-minute, bipartisan “fiscal cliff” deal to extend income tax rates for most Americans, reauthorize expiring tax breaks for certain businesses, and delay deep spending cuts targeting many domestic programs.

http://bit.ly/WgJTbW

Source: ubergizmo .com

We wrote to you last month about a negative review on Yelp that ended in court. The defendant is a woman from Virginia named Jane Perez who took to Yelp, and also on Angie’s List, to express her disappointment with Dietz Development’s service. Perez says that Dietz workmen damaged her house and also stole her jewelry. Dietz owner Christopher Dietz accused Perez of Internet defamation, saying that the allegations were not true. Today, the Virginia Supreme Court has overturned a judge’s previous preliminary injunction to alter or edit the reviews.

http://bit.ly/VF54VY

Source: gizmodo .com

When we tried out a prototype of Tobii's eye controller this time last year, it made us believe in technology again. Unlike many prototypes, though, it's now a real thing.

http://bit.ly/S5lScK

Source: newsfromaoa .org

Reichert Technologies’ new Reflex™ Ultrasound Bio-Microscope (UBM) safely images the anterior and posterior segments of the eye, delivering a superior view not available through other exam methods.

http://bit.ly/10K6hlc

Source: iovs .org

PURPOSE
To evaluate if coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) can protect retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) from apoptosis and, when instilled as eye drops on the cornea, if it can reach the retina and exert its antiapoptotic activity in this area in a mouse model of kainate (KA)-induced retinal damage.

http://bit.ly/12W8uJR

Source: kevinmd .com

Want to know the most viewed posts on KevinMD in 2012? Here they are, in order of pageviews.

http://bit.ly/132xkqG

Source: kevinmd .com

I wanted to expand on something I wrote recently, which relates to my other sort-of-recent post on upcoding. I wrote, about scribes and compliance:
Knowing that the scribe cannot document a complete ROS unless I actually did that ROS, I am more compulsive about making sure I hit all ten systems. (Even when it’s not clinically relevant. Such is the Kafkaesque world we live in.) And I make sure to do a full exam where before I may have elided over a few systems. This is, of course, only for cases where the complexity of the case will justify a service level requiring the complete H&P.

http://bit.ly/WYLWEi

Source: nytimes .com

In a long-awaited interpretation of the new health care law, the Obama administration said Monday that employers must offer health insurance to employees and their children, but will not be subject to any penalties if family coverage is unaffordable to workers.

http://nyti.ms/VheCXL

Source: kevinmd .com

The idea that patients are better off paying their doctor directly and using their insurance only for unaffordable catastrophes is gaining some traction. With implementation of the Affordable Care Act looming in 2014 many patients are looking at their doctor’s already crowded waiting room and wondering how their care will be impacted when their doctor is responsible for even more patients. And doctors who even now are swamped and frustrated with insurance bureaucracy are wondering how much worse things will get when they have less time for more patients.

http://bit.ly/UAuA0T

Source: gizmag .com

Ordinarily, when medical clinicians are conducting blood tests, it’s a somewhat elaborate affair. A full vial of blood must be drawn, individual portions of which are then loaded into large, expensive machines such as mass spectrometers. The results are usually quite accurate, but they’re not instantaneous, and require the services of trained personnel in a well-equipped lab. That may be about to change, however. Scientists from Houston’s Methodist Hospital Research Institute and MD Anderson Cancer Center have created a credit card-sized gadget, that can instantly check a single drop of blood for up to 50 different substances – and it costs about US$10.

http://bit.ly/Vg9Tpc

Source: healio .com

In patients with thin corneas, epi-LASIK for myopia yielded successful results as a safe and predictable surface ablation procedure, but a larger study sample is needed to more accurately quantify results, according to a study.

http://bit.ly/VhRNDb

Source: kevinmd .com

“There’s no passion to be found playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
-Nelson Mandela
Amidst the chaos of our noisy world, it’s hard to know where to begin a new career as a healthcare professional who’s about to inherit an American disaster called healthcare. And it’s likely that in a few years, you may find yourself lost inside a daily bombardment of unsettling, paradoxical messages, and then begin to wonder, “What just happened? What did I do wrong?”

http://bit.ly/VplJzQ

Source: medgadget .com

Researchers from the University of Calgary have shown that doctors can make a stroke diagnosis using an iPhone application just as accurately (and faster) than they can on a traditional computer. In a study recently published by Journal of Medical Internet Research, two neuro-radiologists looked at 120 consecutive noncontrast computed tomography (NCCT) scans and 70 computed tomography angiogram (CTA) head scans.

http://bit.ly/Ubxwj8

Source: bmj .com

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the single most common cause of vision loss in people over the age of 50.1 Individuals with low vision caused by macular disease, experience severe difficulty with everyday tasks such as reading2 which has profound detrimental consequences for their quality of life.3 We have developed an app for the iPad (the MD_evReader) that aims to improve reading by enhancing the effectiveness of the eccentric viewing technique (EV) using dynamic text presentation (figure 1A).

http://bit.ly/WSlwnE

Source: kevinmd .com

I attended a talk by the Dean of Admissions of one of the most competitive medical schools nationwide. The topic was primary care and community health. He talked at length about how not enough medical students were entering primary care. He put up some graphs showing that the most lucrative specialties tend to be the most competitive ones, with primary care among the lowest-paying and least-competitive. He said that medical schools need to be making primary care more appealing. And he talked about how, in his long tenure as Dean of Admissions, he has been steadfastly committed to selecting those applicants who are committed to becoming the next generation of leaders in primary care.

http://bit.ly/10vUoiE

Source: newsfromaoa .org

Your practice could be one of the many practices only performing exams and running a dispensary that is missing out on a third profit center: in-office processing. A new Web series created by The Vision Council offers firsthand commentary from eye care providers around the country who have chosen to invest in in-office processing equipment for their practice, from simple edging and lens assembly to full surfacing.

http://bit.ly/ToPct0

Source: medicalnewstoday .com

Johns Hopkins researchers A. R. Tomas and M. R. Deans have identified a protein needed for neuron organization in the developing retina. The team says that the study helps reveal how the healthy retina - the part of the eye that detects light - is built, and will lead to a greater understanding of what goes wrong in eye disease.

http://bit.ly/WPRHE4

Source: journalofvision .org

Abstract
Cortical blindness is a dense unilateral scotoma that follows primary visual cortex damage. Interestingly CB subjects retain the ability to detect stimuli that have high temporal and low spatial frequency content — termed blindsight, as detection is not always accompanies by awareness. Recent work has shown the effectiveness of repeated perceptual stimulation in shifting the blind field border by using stimuli that are optimized for eliciting blindsight.

http://bit.ly/V8Hj9l

Source: journalofvision .org

Abstract
Impediments to binocularity coupled with a lack of early-life intervention often lead to impaired binocular disparity processing (stereopsis). A visuomotor task was developed to simultaneously train stereopsis and assess the degree to which subjects rely on disparity cues (relative to monocular depth cues) to estimate surface orientation. We asked whether repeated practice on this naturalistic task, akin to object placement on a surface, could aid in recovering stereopsis in stereo-anomalous subjects.

http://bit.ly/Uq8cHg

Source: journalofvision .org

Abstract
Binocular disparity is a very potent cue to depth, but is encoded with poor spatial and temporal resolution compared to luminance information. This fact is important for distributors of 3D content, since it opens up the possibility of saving bandwidth by transmitting a detailed luminance image + coarse depth map. I will discuss the cortical mechanisms believed to be responsible for the relatively poor resolution of stereo 3D.

http://bit.ly/WY9D39

Source: technologyreview .com

“One of the enabling technologies behind a quantum internet will be quantum routers capable of transmitting quantum information from one location to another without destroying it.
That’s no easy task. Quantum bits or qubits are famously fragile—a single measurement destroys them. So it’s not all obvious how macroscopic objects such as routers in a fibre optics network can handle qubits without demolishing them.

http://bit.ly/U51vcF

Source: contraceptionjournal .org

Background
While literacy is a key factor in health across the life course, the association of literacy and teenage childbearing has not been assessed in the US.
Study Design
Prospective cohort study using standardized reading data from 12,339 girls in the seventh grade in the 1996–97 or 1997–98 academic years of the Philadelphia Public School System linked to birth records from the city of Philadelphia (1996–2002).

http://bit.ly/Uc60k0

Source: medscape .com

Children and adolescents living in the United States in states with higher levels of ultraviolet B (UVB) exposure are much less likely to develop autism than their counterparts living in states with lower levels of solar UVB exposure, new research shows.

http://bit.ly/Uc58vO

Source: imedicalapps .com

Purpose of App Review
*To evaluate how well the Keynote app for iPad and iPhone can be used by health professionals to create and present digital slide shows.
*To evaluate how well the Keynote Remote app allows presenters to direct a slide presentation using an iPhone as a remote.
*To give a video demonstration of how Keynote works on the iPad and to show specific ways that health professionals can use it.

http://bit.ly/TGIRex

Source: gigaom .com

The rise of electronic health records, other digital health platforms and connected devices has made healthcare more vulnerable to security breaches almost any other industry, according to a recent investigation by The Washington Post.

http://bit.ly/U26gDG

Source: kevinmd .com

I was working in the ER this weekend when one of my nurses asked me a simple question: “How would you fix the health care system?” Obviously, this is a complex problem requiring complex solutions, but in an environment where at any minute a heart attack or a stroke could disrupt a conversation I prepared a sound bite for an answer.

http://bit.ly/UaOEnH

Source: medgadget .com

Implanting chemical sensors directly into the body for long-term monitoring of glucose and other important molecules could prove extremely beneficial, especially to diabetics that need to keep a continuous and close eye on their sugar levels. A major problem that prevents the development of practical monitoring implants, called “biophouling”, is due to the body’s own immune system attacking foreign objects and plugging up any sensor components that are exposed. Researchers have spent considerable effort over the years attempting to design materials that would not trigger an immune response, but it turns out that the body has a mind of its own and is not easy to fool.

http://bit.ly/V6ycWF

Source: newsfromaoa .org

“Lights, Camera, Contacts: A History of Contact Lenses in the Movie Industry” was the theme as Morton Greenspoon, O.D., provided this year’s Optometric Historical Society “Blast from the Past” program Oct. 26, in Phoenix, Ariz.

http://bit.ly/TZqKwO

Source: science20 .com

Branch retinal vein occlusion – blockage of the blood vessels that channel blood from the retina – is a common eye disease. A type of blood clot in the eye, the disease causes reduced vision, and people with the disease also typically have an increased risk of hypertension, diabetes and other serious conditions.

http://bit.ly/TjHS1E

Source: reuters .com

Imagine you were a devoted husband, waiting to hear from your wife about her due date after a visit to the obstetrician, and you saw these on your phone:
"every where thinging days nighing"
"Some is where!"

http://reut.rs/UmHMpY

Source: wiley .com

Generics are named "equivalent". This is expected to (a) increase physicians’ confidence in this class of products and (b) to reinforce the concept that no difference exists between generics and the brand. Registering a drug as “generic” means that the generic is endorsing “some” but not “every” feature of the originator. Let's start considering, for example, the “bioavailability”. Bioavailability indicates the blood concentration of the drug over the time elapsing from its entry into the blood stream until its elimination. The curve drawn by the concentration/time diagram is limiting an area, the so called Area Under the Curve (AUC). The AUC is adopted as a parameter to compare a generic with its brand. The present regulations allow a generic to have a bioavailability within ± 20% of the brand's one.

http://bit.ly/WRL1cc

Source: kevinmd .com

I can truly say logging on to the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants website and seeing I’ve passed the boards was one of the happiest moments of my life. All of the hours invested learning to take great care of patients was worth that feeling. Like an entire generation of young new MD/DO/PA/NP graduates looking to make a positive impact in this world, I never felt more ready to begin my career.

http://bit.ly/UmGWJG

Source: berkeley .edu

Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.

http://bit.ly/U9F5oY

Source: wiley .com

Although first described more than 150 years ago, keratoconus is still an enigmatic disease that remains an area of wide-ranging, dynamic, international research. This review considers data from New Zealand/Aotearoa, where keratoconus is both relatively common and extensively studied. New Zealand researchers have made several significant contributions to the international literature in this field, including identifying a higher prevalence of keratoconus in New Zealand per se and within Maori and Polynesian populations compared to many international studies.

http://bit.ly/W263yv

Source: bbc .co.uk

It's three years since audiences around the world swarmed into cinemas to see James Cameron's Avatar. It rapidly became the biggest grossing film of all time, in part because of its ground-breaking digital 3D technology.

http://bbc.in/WRJZNA

Source: newsfromaoa .org

Is your practice “family owned and operated?” Optometric practices are often passed down from generation to generation.
Optometrists who allow their children to work in their practices can help their offspring to determine if they would enjoy a career in eye care and, if so, help them get some experience in day-to-day practice operations.

http://bit.ly/U4ZATQ