Innovations shaping the future of optometry
Justin Schweitzer, OD, of Vance Thompson Vision, spoke with Optometry 360 about his recent presentation at the American Academy of Optometry 2025 Annual Meeting. His talk focused on new technologies in glaucoma, new treatments in dry eye disease, and more. “It’s an exciting time to be an optometrist,” he said.
Justin Schweitzer, OD:
Hello, my name is Justin Schweitzer. I’m an optometrist at Vance Thompson Vision, and it really was an honor to present a lecture Frontiers in Eye Care: Shaping the Innovations in Optometry with two of my really good friends and colleagues, Dr. Selina McGee and Dr. Ben Gaddie at this year’s Academy meeting. We focused on a ton of different innovations that optometrists should be aware of, that optometrists are utilizing in their clinics on a daily basis.
To kick it off, we focused a little bit around glaucoma and discussing some of the new technologies, not necessarily treatment options, but focusing on different types of maybe VR headset technologies that many of you are utilizing, some at-home testing that is starting to make a little bit of a push, whether it be measuring intraocular pressure at home or looking at doing some visual fields at home. We did talk a little bit about some surgical innovations in glaucoma because, as optometrists, these patients are coming into our clinics and we’re having to manage and monitor and take care of these patients. Being comfortable with what are some complications that can occur was important for us to discuss as well.
From there, we really moved on to the dry eye space, which is a massive, robust space with a lot of new technologies that have come on recently and how do we tease out what we’re utilizing to manage our dry eye patients? With all the new pharmaceutical agents that have come out in the last 5 years, where should we be utilizing these? We spent a lot of time debating and discussing our beliefs around those different types of technologies and presented a couple cases on those as well.
We then shifted to talking about the presbyopic pharmaceutical space, which is an exciting new area, and where do we utilize these types of agents? What type of patients are ideal for certain types of agents? Can these be utilized in patients that have had previous cataract surgery? Who are the ideal presbyopes to utilize these, and again, some hefty debate, but in a good way, to discuss where and when we should utilize these.
We then focused a little bit on cornea and cataract, some of this being obviously surgical in nature, but again, what’s the OD’s role, the optometrist’s role in trying to manage these types of patients, especially with a bunch of the new innovations in cataract surgery, specifically IOLs and patients coming into our clinics requesting certain types of advanced premium IOL technology. How do we manage the psychology around some of these technologies when even though the outcome is wonderful, we still have patients that maybe are not all thrilled?
It’s an exciting time to be an optometrist. I think we have a variety of different technologies that we can educate on, lean in to make our patients’ lives better, and it was a lot of fun being able to deliver this lecture with two of my good friends and colleagues who are so well-educated and so close to the pulse of optometry in these different types of technologies.
