In this episode of Clinical Trials Spotlight, Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO, speaks with Kaleb Abbott, OD, about how to design meaningful survey studies, such as Dr. Abbott’s burnout study that is circulating through the optometric community. The 2 discuss best practices for survey studies, mistakes to avoid, and insights that allow you to get the most from your findings.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Welcome to Clinical Trials Spotlight, the podcast where innovation, research, and patient care comes into focus. I’m Andrew Pucker, Chief Development Officer at Mintra Health, and your host for this series exploring the latest developments in optometry and ophthalmology clinical trials. Each episode, we’ll sit down with leading clinicians, researchers, industry experts, and innovators shaping the future of eyecare. From emerging innovations in study design, patient outcomes, and regulatory insights, we’ll take you behind the scenes of the clinical research transforming optometry and ophthalmology.
Whether you’re a clinician, researcher, industry professional, or simply passionate about advancing vision science, this podcast is designed to bring you thoughtful conversations and practical insights from across the ophthalmology and optometry community. Clinical Trials Spotlight is co-produced by Mintra Health and Ophthalmology 360 and Optometry 360. Thank you for joining us. Let’s get started.
In this episode, we’re exploring an easy way for clinicians to get into research. Clinical trials often require specialized infrastructure, regulatory oversight, and significant resources, but research doesn’t always have to start there. Survey studies provide an accessible and impactful way for clinicians to answer important questions, contribute to the scientific literature, and build research experience.
Today’s guest is Dr. Kaleb Abbott. Kaleb is an optometrist, researcher, and educator who recently led an important study examining burnout within the optometric profession. His work highlights how thoughtfully designed surveys can provide meaningful insights into issues affecting clinicians’ everyday life. Today, we’ll discuss how survey research works, how to design a high-quality study, common mistakes to avoid, and how clinicians can use survey research as their first step into clinical investigations. Kaleb, thanks for being here. Could you please tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to survey research?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Of course, thanks for having me, Andrew. I like that you said “thoughtfully designed surveys,” because I think ours are thoughtfully designed. Sometimes, the reviewers of the manuscripts do not think that they are thoughtfully designed. My name is Kaleb Abbott. I’m an optometrist and Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. I practice in our dry eye clinic and our center for ocular inflammation. I’m primarily doing ocular surface disease. I’m in clinic about two-thirds of the time; about one-third of my time is spent doing research. I really got into research when I did my master’s degree, which I was this close to converting to a PhD, but ended up leaving it at a master’s degree. That kind of gave me a little bit of some insight into how to conduct research.
When I got back into a university setting, I really wanted to get back into research. I think it’s just such a fun thing to do. It’s a great opportunity to figure out ways to just provide help in other ways besides just helping a patient individually, figuring out ways to answer pertinent questions.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I’ve worked with Kaleb now for at least a few years, and I could attest that he easily could have completed a PhD program. I think he’s a really good example of someone showing you don’t need that level of degree to do great work. Kaleb’s doing all kinds of different things with surveys, the Cochrane Review, industry-funded studies, and I think he’s a great person for our topic today. I really wanted to talk about surveys today because I think it’s a good way for optometrists and ophthalmologists to get into research. I don’t think they’re always well understood by even the scientific community. I get pushback, as Kaleb said, from reviewers. They say, “Oh, your survey’s garbage.” Well, you don’t really try to understand survey research because there’s validated surveys like the OSDI or one of those. Then, there are surveys that you collect kind of like patient data, which we’re going to talk about today.
You go talk to your patient, you get some feedback, maybe you understand better how a drop feels or that sort of thing, or how optometrists are doing with burnout. With that, Kaleb, could you tell us about your famous burnout study? What inspired you to do that, and how’d you do it?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah, I had no intention of it becoming famous, but it has gained a lot of traction. It was back in 2023, I was profoundly burnt out myself, and I just started asking questions like, “Is there something unique to me? Why am I burnt out? Are other people burnt out?” Being someone who’s in academia, the first thing I want to do is go to the literature and see: am I experiencing something different than other people are experiencing? When I tried to find the answer as to whether or not optometrists are burnt out in the United States, there were no answers to be found. I figured out that there’s no research that has ever been done on this. I decided that we would launch our own study on burnout. I will say, if you’re burnt out, launching a study on burnout does not improve your burnout at all.
In fact, it made it quite a bit worse… But that was initially what inspired me to start the study on burnout. Since then, I’ve actually modified a lot about my life, my work, how many patients I’m seeing, and how often I’m in clinic based on the research that we were able to generate. It actually has really helped my burnout overall.
[Editor’s note: Learn more about this burnout survey.]
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Yeah, it’s a great paper. What journal is it in? Is it Optometry and Vision Science? I forget.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah, the first one is Journal of Optometry. Then we did a secondary, a follow-up study called “Exploring gender differences and professional well-being amongst optometrists.” That one is in Optometry and Vision Science. Then we actually have a third paper that’s hopefully going to come out later on this year that’s specifically on job satisfaction amongst optometrists.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
That’s great. You did 1 survey; you’re getting 3 papers out of it. You’re making more work for yourself, but it’s been a really well-received topic. As Kaleb said, I saw him at a conference. The room was packed, and everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
I think it’s because everyone’s burnt out.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Yeah.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
They need help.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Why do you think survey studies are a potentially good entry point for clinicians, and what do you need to do to get involved in them?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
I think first off, they’re studies that inherently make a lot of sense. You ask a question that’s out there that has kind of a subjective answer to it. Are you burnt out? Are you satisfied with your job? Are you stressed with your job? Things like that. You can ask questions that everybody is able to wrap their heads around and generate a lot of interest because some of the studies that are done… They’re so convoluted; they’re so complex. It’s really hard for the average clinician to just read this paper and understand what in the world that’s about, let alone conduct the research themselves. But surveys just provide this amazing opportunity, if done appropriately, to just answer questions that people are interested in. It’s easy to generate your question. It’s easy to generate your hypothesis. You just have to be very careful about how you design the survey to make sure you get good enough data.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I think that’s really important. I’ve done several survey studies myself, and what I come back to is you want to keep it as simple as possible while getting the information you want. As Kaleb said, 1 question could be, are you burned out? Yes or no? That’s an easy answer.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Whereas if you had to grade your level of burnout on a 1 to 10 scale, that is way more potentially confusing to people taking the survey. The simpler you can make it, the better.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah. We learned, and you taught me a lot of this, but it’s nice to have something on a Likert scale where there are 5 different options where you go from never, to sometimes, to maybe half the time, to frequently, to all the time, or something like that that you can have on a continuous scale. You say, how often are you feeling burnt out? Then you can end up giving easy answer choices for somebody to choose, but it also makes the statistics a lot easier to do too, because if you make everything a yes or no question, I feel like it’s much more difficult to run stats on that.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
For sure. My mentor was Don Mudy. He was part of the CLEAR study. The way he worded 1 question in his research ended up driving millions and millions of dollars of research going forward. Specifically, they asked, “Do you spend more time on outdoor and sport activities?” That just made a whole new field. Is it sports that make…
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Wow.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
…you have less myopic progression or is it being outdoors?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Thinking about that now, it’s kind of obvious to us, but back then in 1987 when they wrote that question, they’re like, “Oh, this is a good question.” But…
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah. I will say, anytime you do a survey-based study, which I think we’re on our sixth one right now, you always wish after you get the data that you would’ve asked something differently. There’s no perfectly designed study. Even in our burnout study, which we’re going to repeat again in a few years, we already know which questions we plan on tweaking. We’re going to add additional questions too. You may be kicking yourself down the road saying, “Oh, I should have asked this differently.” That’s true of every single survey-based study that’s ever been done.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Kind of every clinical trial too. You get through a trial like, “Oh, I wish I would’ve used that endpoint or done it differently.”
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
It’s maybe a good thing because it’s making new study ideas for you. What do you think?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yes, and I think it ends up making you a better researcher too. The more you do, the more you’re able to sharply trim your questions to the most pertinent ones, then figure out the other best questions that you should be asking.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Now that you’ve done a few research studies, what do you think are some common misconceptions people have about them?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
I think most of the misconceptions don’t come from the clinicians who are reading the studies because clinicians appreciate them. It’s really the scientists. The scientists are so hard on survey-based research because I think that they’re used to doing a lot more in-depth studies, a lot more complicated studies. They say, “Oh, that’s just an easy study.” I think people failed to realize the impact that survey-based studies can have. I think our burnout studies opened a lot of people’s eyes, and I think it’s helped a lot of people understand whether or not they’re experiencing burnout. It’s given them hope that we can get out of burnout by doing certain things. Look, these were the risk factors for burnout, and these are the protective factors for burnout. I think the biggest misconception is that survey-based studies can’t be impactful because I really think that they can.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I totally agree with you. We need to keep convincing the scientists that it’s important.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah. My wife does a lot of survey-based studies, but a lot of her research is qualitative in nature. She gets so frustrated with people trashing the research that she does that she finally vented to me one day and just yelled, “Qualitative research matters too.” I actually made her a shirt for Mother’s Day that actually has those words on it: “Qualitative research matters too.” She’s going to wear it in a 5K that she’s going to run that’s supporting research for pediatric neurogenetic epilepsy.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
That’s amazing. All right. If I’m coming to survey research, and we already talked a little bit about the structure of how we write a question, but should an investigator build their own research, their own questions, or should they be using these validated questions, or both? What do you suggest to people?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
If there is a validated questionnaire that already exists, it’s much easier to use that because it’s already out there. It’s been validated by some means, which we’ve talked about before. There are a lot of questions as to how things are validated. But if there’s something that’s already generally accepted as a good survey-based tool, it’s really nice to use that because you’re going to get a lot less pushback from the reviewers, and you can compare it to other studies that have been done before. I think it’s always really nice to use that. When we did the burnout study, there were many different burnout questionnaires that had been validated, and we actually chose one that had been validated. It was called The Mini-Z. The reviewers still didn’t like that particular survey. They were still like, “Oh, you should have used this other one. It was better validated.” It’s crazy out there, but it’s best to try to use the highest-quality survey that exists that is generally accepted that’s out there because it just makes your life a little bit easier, and hopefully it’s been published on quite a bit at that point.
It’s considered valid, but you can also compare. Having said that, there’s lots of studies that I’ve done that there is no valid questionnaire that exists. We just did one on how dry eye providers, optometrists, and ophthalmologists make their treatment decisions. There’s no validated questionnaire on that topic. We created our own. That was also kind of nice because they couldn’t say, “Oh, you should have used this validated questionnaire because there wasn’t one.” If there’s one that exists in the research that you’re doing, I would try to use that. But you may ask a question that there is no validated questionnaire for it, in which case you come up with your own.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Yeah, I think it’s really great to include, like you said, a validated instrument and then some other questions, kind of the mashup of the 2 like you’ve been doing, because the validated survey often helps reviewers get past the science part, and then you can get these additional tidbits to help with patient care or whatever you’re doing.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
You can also have a study that has both. We have a study right now; I just drafted the manuscript for it, but it’s on gut dysbiosis symptoms like bloating and sugary food cravings, processed food cravings, food aversion, stuff like that. But we are comparing it to a validated questionnaire called the SPEED questionnaire. We’re comparing gut dysbiosis symptoms with dry eye symptoms. In this case, we came up with one of the studies or one of the surveys, and then we’re using a validated one for the other.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
That’s great. Maybe for context, I should just go through what a validated survey is. I don’t know if everyone really knows that. If you’re going to make a validated survey, you probably interview the population of interest, you get a bunch of questions, and then you, maybe with your expert clinicians, whittle through them, and then you give the survey out to some people, see how they do with it, and then you get it back, and then you refine it. Then you do an actual, almost clinical trial to make sure that works. Then you do something called psychometrics, a special statistical analysis to see if every question makes sense. Then from there, you get down from your 100 questions to 10, which you need a high-powered statistician, PhD kind of person, doing that. That’s probably not your everyday clinician like Kaleb and I. Don’t think you’re going to be making your own validated survey unless you’ve got a team.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
I think you forgot the last step. The last step is just hope and pray that the reviewers accept your methods.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Yeah, for sure. They’re both good, but yeah, I’d say the validated one is going to be the next level thing and you need to have friends. Going with that, I mentioned a lot of questions; maybe they are 12 questions long, or a lot of surveys are 12 questions long. What do you think is the ideal survey length?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
That’s a good question. I mean, as long as it can be that is not going to dissuade people from doing the study, that is the best survey length really. I’ve done surveys that I wish we would’ve asked more questions. We could have gone in more depth, but we were worried people wouldn’t fill it all out because that was going to take 10 minutes. Then I’ve done the flip end where we’ve had some of our dry eye patients fill out a survey that has taken some of them 20, 25 minutes to fill out, and we collected a ridiculous amount of data. But halfway through, the link breaks, or halfway through the patient says, “I don’t have time for this. I’m going to drop out of the study or not do this.” I mean, really as much data as you can possibly get that’s not going to dissuade people from actually doing the study.
But make sure all of your questions are thoughtful and reasonable questions and that you’re actually going to be generating good data from it. The thing with our burnout study, we initially thought, oh, we’re just going to collect this data and publish on burnout. But we collected all this data, and we realized, wow, we’re actually sitting on a goldmine of data because we asked enough questions that now we could do a burnout study; then we can do a follow-up study comparing differences between men and women in terms of professional well-being; now we’re doing that third study where that’s just on job satisfaction. If you ask enough questions, sometimes you end up with so much data that you can actually generate a lot of abstracts, a lot of posters, a lot of papers.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
How do you identify the right patient population when you’re doing these? Are you looking at patients in clinic? Are you sending out email surveys? What have you done in the past?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah, so like I said, we’ve done about six of these studies. The first 3 were really focused just on optometrists and their professional well-being. We said we need to obviously just include optometrists, but even then we had to be a little bit more selective because we really just wanted to focus on the United States because we didn’t think we’d probably get enough survey respondents from different countries that we would be able to generate decent data. At the beginning of the study, you had to say, “I’m an optometrist.” Then you have to say, “I live in the United States.” If you answered no to any of that, then you couldn’t finish those questions.
Then, in some of the other studies we’ve done, we were focusing just on dry eye patients that were bad enough that they were seeking care in a specialty dry eye clinic. You do have to define your population well at the beginning because if you don’t do that, I think it’s going to give you a lot of headaches probably in a few months.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
With that, are you doing monetary incentives? Are you just hoping people volunteer their time? What kind of approaches do you recommend?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
No, we’re experts at convincing people that this is for the greater good, that this is going to benefit optometrists in general, that this is going to benefit patients in general. And I don’t know. Our patients, they’re going to an academic institution. They know that being part of clinical trials and being part of studies comes with that territory. A lot of them are already interested. But honestly, I think for a lot of these survey-based studies, if it’s taking 10 minutes of the patient’s time, a lot of times they don’t really expect that they need to be compensated for that. They’re just excited to be part of a study to know that they’re doing something that’s going to benefit patients, hopefully in a few years.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I think that makes sense. If you’re doing a short survey, 10 minutes, you can probably get them to volunteer their time. If you ask them to do a half-hour or more, you might have to have them in clinic to answer it and probably pay them.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Or if you have to bring them back for another visit, you’d probably have to compensate them. Or if you’re, yeah, making them undergo additional testing, that’s going to take more time or various things. But I think for a simple survey-based study, you don’t have to worry that much about funding, that much about compensating your participants.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
That’s great because if you’re getting into research, you probably don’t have much money to spend on that research. If you can…
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Correct.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
…get people to give you data for free, that’s a win-win.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
I had to beg my department for $1000 to pay the American Academy of Optometry to distribute our survey, and they graciously said yes.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
That’s also a skill: fundraising.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah. They’re a department of ophthalmology. I think ophthalmology departments can still care about optometry professionals’ well-being.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
That’s great. They need us. Okay, so you have these survey questions. What are the next steps? Do you need IRB approval? What do you need to do to implement this?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah, so I guess the first thing is you want to, yeah, come up with your initial set of questions. You really need to run it past people who have done survey-based studies before, ideally someone who’s a survey methodologist, but we don’t all work with people like that. Find someone who’s done survey-based studies. Andrew helped me a lot at the beginning with this, kind of helping me understand what are questions you can ask and how can you ask it in such a way that you can generate good data from it. That’s really important because if you don’t come up with good questions at the beginning, the entire project is sunk. It’s really important to have a great set of questions. Initially, questions that you know how you’re going to do, the statistics, you understand what you’re going to do with the data once you have it.
Once you’ve built that out, you need to get IRB approval. But most survey-based studies, most of them will be IRB exempt because you’re not having to collect a lot of patient information or a lot of really sensitive information. For our burnout one, we were collecting really just where the practitioner lived, so where they were practicing, and their age and things like that, which the Internal Review Board didn’t really deem that as something that needed a lot of IRB approval, something that could be exempt. For some of the other studies we’ve done, we have collected patient information. We collected clinical sign data from patients. We were looking at corneal staining, and conj staining, and tear breakup time and all of those good things. In that case, that did require IRB approval. When you’re collecting patient information, or sometimes detailed information about maybe practitioners, that may require IRB approval.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Just to dive down on that a little bit. Exempt IRB means you still actually send them some documents and then they say, “Oh, it’s good enough. You can go ahead, and we don’t need to watch you constantly.”
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yes.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Then you can do a regular expedited or full review application, which is going to take a whole bunch more information from you and from the patients, etc. Then they might go to a review board, and it’s not a big deal, but it just takes more time. If you can keep it on the exempt side, you’re going to be having a much easier life.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah. To me, I haven’t really found that there’s a huge difference between some of my studies that are IRB-exempt versus IRB-approved. I still personally felt like I was having to do all the work to submit the protocol anyway. Then they just give their stamp of approval saying, “Yes, you can go ahead and start this study.” Maybe at our institution it takes a little bit longer if it’s IRB approval, but you still have to do the work even for an IRB exemption.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
IRB approval really depends on your institution. I worked at Ohio State and that could be 6 months. Whereas if I work with a central IRB that’s a privatized sort of institution, it could be 2 weeks. That’s quite a spectrum. Awesome. You’ve collected the responses. Now what do you do? You have, we’ll say, 200 surveys completed on your burnout study, your dry eye study. What do you do after that?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah, this is when I think a lot of people start to fudge the rules a little bit. You should have a hypothesis before you do any study. You should say, “This is my hypothesis.” Then you essentially base the statistics that you’re doing off of the notion of this is what we’re hypothesizing and then we’ll see whether or not we are right. This is when I feel like a lot of research sometimes just starts mining for data, mining for P values and things like that, which is really not what you’re supposed to do. Ideally, you are sticking with the hypothesis that you generated. You’re running the statistics that you already decided that you were going to run before the study. That’s how the study really should be done. Then you end up getting your data, and you figure out whether or not what is statistically significant and what is not statistically significant.
I think what happens sometimes with people who don’t have a lot of formal research training or people who just want good results is that you start generating different hypotheses based on glimpses that you’ve seen of what the data is. I think lots of people do this. We understand that it’s not the scientific method, but in cases like that, maybe you’re saying, “Okay, this is really interesting. We should explore this.” But I think technically the right thing to do at that point is to lower the P value; that means that something is statistically significant. We have done some of these kinds of exploratory analyses with our studies, but instead of using a P value of less than 0.05, we actually lower that P value to less than 0.001 just because we felt like we were mining some of the data at that point. But again, once you typically have your data, you go with your initial plan that you set forth in the protocol.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
That’s great. Then, of course, you could send that as an abstract to a conference and get some feedback.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Oh, yes.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Hopefully you’re publishing that.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yes. Once you have the data, really you want to get… It’s a lot of work to do these studies. You want to get the most out of the study that you possibly can. Ideally, you’re submitting an abstract; you’re presenting it as a poster at some sort of conference. Then hopefully you turn that into a manuscript. Please don’t just leave it as an abstract. Hopefully it’s good enough that you can publish it as a manuscript. Then I like to then reach out sometimes to optometry trade publications and say, “Hey, this is a study that we just published if you’re interested in covering it.” Because it’s hard for these trade publications to know all the different research that’s published, sometimes they’re very interested, and then they’ll cover your publication as well. You really want to maximize the impact with each study that you do. It’s a lot of work, so you deserve the credit.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
Yeah, for sure. I always like to build the why for doing things, and you kind of hit on one of those. You can publish this in a trade journal, and that maybe could be a summary of your peer-reviewed manuscript or something, but what are some of the key benefits that you think you’ve gotten from doing this work? Why should other optometrists get involved in it?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
I mean, the top reason you should do studies is really to benefit the industry, to benefit patients. That’s why research should be done: you know that you’re helping people. You really should have a higher calling for this, and you really should see yourself as someone who’s uniquely positioned to answer questions that are going to benefit people. But then, from a personal or professional standpoint too, my dad always said there are really 2 things with your profession that nobody can take away from you. They can’t take away a degree. Once you’ve earned your OD, you have that OD for life. No one can take that away from you. Another thing someone can’t take away from you is every publication that you have. That is something that you have that is going to be out there for eternity. As long as people have access to Google Scholar or PubMed, they’ll be able to see that publication.
It really is a great thing out there for your career. People recognize the experts that publish these papers. I’ve been asked to do things like advisory boards based on publications that I’ve gotten. That was not my reason for doing the publication, but they say, “Oh, you’re an expert in this area. We’ll bring you on as a consultant or to an advisory board meeting because we recognize your area of expertise.” Sometimes it opens up doors to do podcasts like this one. Sometimes it’ll open up doors for you to maybe be able to write articles for various trade publications like Optometry 360. Really there’s a lot of downstream effects when you do good work, and your initial goal is I’m going to help people, but then other good things follow with it.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I love that message. I think one thing you’re hitting at is you might not even know what might come out of that. A personal example is I did a comparison of the SPEED survey and the OSDI; they’re 2 dry eye surveys, and that helped me get 2 consulting projects to help companies propose to the FDA that the SPEED is a survey that is good enough to use in an FDA trial.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Exactly.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I never would’ve thought that was a thing, but it was a cool opportunity.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah, I think what people don’t realize, and why some people don’t want to do research, is there’s a lag between when you do all this work and when you reap some sort of a reward for it. It takes a lot of this upfront work, and it may be months later or a year or 2 years or 5 years later that all of a sudden you start to see all these downstream benefits, but it is worth it in the end.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
We’re starting to run out of time. I just wanted to ask you, what you’d recommend for someone whose kind of been in your shoes, like optometrist, ophthalmologist? What would you recommend for them to get started?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
I think the best thing you can do if you want to get started is find someone that you admire who’s done the work before and just ask if you can be a part of a project. Sometimes people will say yes to that. Sometimes people will say no to that. If you end up finding people that say, “No, you’re not just going to be attached to a project that I’m doing,” then you need to offer them more. Maybe you say, “Okay, I’ve got this idea for a project. I really want to do a study on factors that cause job stress related to optometrists and see if vision insurance is the reason all these optometrists are stressed.” Let’s say you got this idea. Then maybe find that person who’s done studies before and say, “I’ve got this idea. I want to see this out, and can you help me then come up with this?” Sometimes mentors respond better if you’re not just saying, “I want to join anything, but here’s an idea. Is there a way we can work together on this?”
I think it’s probably best to approach someone with an idea. Find a mentor, optometrist, ophthalmologist in general are really nice people and they’re fine helping people out if you’re going to do your share of the work and you’re going to do the legwork on a project. But if you’re just trying to be a leech on the work that they’re already doing, they may be less interested in helping you out. Find someone out there that’s a mentor and try to figure out ways to start to get involved. But I’ve seen people try to start projects before that maybe they’ve generated decent data, but they didn’t know that they had to get an IRB approval, and then now their project has sunk, or maybe they have done a survey-based study on their own, but then they realize that they kind of asked questions the wrong way, and it’s not publishable. This is really why you want to work with someone who has experience.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I think that’s great advice. I don’t think you necessarily have to hook up with an academic. They could be maybe in private practice and have done a lot of research, but maybe you have a connection to academia that could allow you to do this work. As Kaleb said, I think if you propose a project to someone, you’ll say, “I’ll do most of the work; I want your feedback; you can be an author.” They’re probably going to go for it unless they’re totally just buried in work, right?
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yes.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
With that, I’d like to thank Kaleb for joining us on the podcast today.
Kaleb Abbott, OD, MS, FAAO:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Andrew. This was great.
Andrew Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO:
I also would like to thank you for joining us today on the Clinical Trials Spotlight. If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe and share the podcast with colleagues and others passionate about advancing ophthalmology and optometry research and patient care. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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