Conversations on Early Intervention and Postop Glaucoma Complications

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for this podcast comes from Bryn Mawr Communications. BMC produces a number of informative podcast series spanning a variety of topics in optometry. Discover a new show at itunes.net/podcasts.

**Cecelia Koetting** (0:21)
You're listening to The MOD Pod, a companion podcast to Modern Optometry, the go-to publication for full scope O.D.s navigating the evolution of our profession. I'm your host, Cecelia Koetting. Join me every month to hear me speak with authors from each issue. We'll talk about their articles, get more in depth about particular points of interest, discuss how to apply tips and suggestions in real life practice and more.
Hi, I am Cecelia Koetting. I am the new host of MOD Pod, a companion podcast to Modern Optometry. Now, some of you might be a little confused, right? Because in the past, MOD Pod has actually been a podcast of the authors reading the papers verbatim. Well, guess up, we're changing it up. We are actually gonna have myself, along with the authors, to have a conversation about their paper, about their article, and get a little bit more in-depth, get a little different understanding about the author and who they are, ask them maybe a couple of fun questions. And I think it will be quite a bit of fun. I'm excited and I hope you come to join and listen and you enjoy it as well. Welcome to MOD Pod, I am Cecelia Koetting, and I am coming to you from Denver, Colorado, and I'm joined with Chris Kuc this evening, coming to us from Pennsylvania, who is currently with the group Medical Optometry America. Hi Chris, how are you?

**Chris Kuc** (2:08)
Hi Cecelia, wonderful to be here, super excited.

**Cecelia Koetting** (2:11)
I'm so excited to have you. So fun enough, Chris and I actually previously worked very closely together at Virginia Eye Consultants. We were CK1 and CK2. And we've both moved on to our next adventure. So what I want to hear is, tell me about your new clinic and what you're currently doing.

**Chris Kuc** (2:33)
Yeah, it's a great, great practice right outside of Philadelphia area, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. Again, I work with a group called Medical Optometry America.
And we have this concept of bringing the medical-based model of optometry for right now to the Philadelphia market. So we've got three offices currently, one in Newtown Square is mine, one in Plymouth meeting, and then one in Horsham for those of you who know the Philadelphia area. But we have, it's wonderful. We're given all the gadgets, we have the latest technology, imaging, testing, in-office treatments, everything that we had at our fingertips at the large surgical center we worked at in Virginia, in an optometry setting for diagnostics and patient care, which has been super exciting. We have done a really hard work networking and sort of integrating with the health system there, which has been probably the most important step because if you want to build the medical model, you have to gain the trust of your referring doctors and physicians in the area that care for the patients that need their eyes help. So that's been objective number one, which has really taken off in the past year and a half. So I started in April of 2022, and things are just going really well right now.

**Cecelia Koetting** (3:54)
Good. That's awesome hearing. Yes, we did a lot of growing of our optometry network while in Virginia. So I know that's something you do very well.

**Chris Kuc** (4:04)
That's right.

**Cecelia Koetting** (4:04)
Yeah, that's right. What else? Anything that's been newer, that's been exciting within, I don't know, even eye care that you have been doing?

**Chris Kuc** (4:15)
Well, all the gold standards obviously at our clinic there. But for the past year, I did kind of a deep dive. One of our focuses is prevention and early detection. And with the imaging and the diagnostics, that's very at your fingertips. So I did a deep dive into neurodegenerative disease. And I did a little bit of talking on that first to my patients. But more now at the local and national level at a couple of meetings. And we're really, really close to having a merger of imaging and caring for these patients at the eye care level very, very soon, I think. And that's exciting. I didn't realize what a burden the neurodegenerative diseases are on the health system. It's massive. When you look at the cost of macular degeneration on an annual basis and think about all the injections patients get, it's almost like triple that or at least double that.
And the eye could very well be sort of a window and a key to detecting these patients earlier, getting them identified and helping them sort of turn things around before they decline and have real problems, specifically with Alzheimer's, that's the big one.