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DigiSight brings mobile and cloud-based computing to ophthalmology with Paxos portfolio

Vision care, especially for patients with Age-related Macular Degeneration, is being improved drastically with the integration of DigiSight's mobile platform, Paxos. It also provides an abundant source of data for pharmaceutical companies.

San Francisco-based DigiSight Technologies announced today at the 2015 Ophthalmology Innovation Summit the launch of a new suite of products within its Paxos portfolio, which are designed to allow physicians and researchers to monitor patients’ vision care in real time via a mobile platform.

The products include a HIPAA-compliant cloud-based portal, a vision assessment smartphone application (Paxos Checkup), a mobile imaging device (Paxos Scope) and an analytics package that will provide insight on clinical study outcomes with high frequency longitudinal data.

The Paxos portfolio is designed to take data from these different mobile tests and integrate them into a common back-end so that it can be used in clinical care for research purposes.

Most of the technology is being used for Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) patients. “For the first time, a physician is able to monitor a patient at home using the technology,” DigiSight CEO Doug Foster said in an interview. “Or if you’re conducting a clinical trial and you’re interested to see how patients are doing in between office examinations, you now have a way of doing that.”

For a clinical trial, Fosters says with these tests taken at home researchers can now get 10 times as much data to see how patients respond to drugs.  This de-identified, aggregated data set is then a great resource for pharmaceutical companies creating new drugs or even with already FDA approved drugs, this data can be valuable for marketing.

There are 12 tests available within the platform, 10 of which are patient administered tests using the mobile application. The other two are anatomical tests to get images of both the front and back of the eye using the Paxos Scope, a hardware add-on for a mobile device, which are administered by a physician or medical professional.

Foster says they’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easily the older patients adapt and really like the mobile technology.

“The reason why is when you’re older and you’re diagnosed with a chronic condition that leads to blindness, and there’s no cure, that’s a very scary thing to hear,” he said. “Today, without this technology, there really isn’t much a patient can do to manage AMD. It’s not like you can go for a run and your eyes will get better or eat less red meat. When you give a patient technology and say you can now create more data to share with your physician, that’s actually a really exciting thing for them.”

In addition to that, the app’s interface was designed specifically for older patients who may be visually impaired. They’ve used high-contrast colors, larger font sizes and the instructions for the tutorials are available both in written form and via audio recordings.

DigiSight’s main focus right now is for this technology to be used in clinical studies with pharmaceutical companies, but it has specific benefits for use between patients and physicians as well.

“It’s a game-changer, especially in terms of screening patients in remote areas,” said John Welling, M.D., Himalayan Cataract Project International Fellow, according to a company statement. “Traditional ocular imaging equipment is not portable, and cost-prohibitive in much of the developing world. In the absence of quality image-sharing capability, patients will often be referred, which means traveling to an eye care facility – sometimes days away – to receive a proper diagnosis and subsequent treatment.”

Photos courtesy of DigiSight

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