In November 2022, PeriVision was selected to participate in a national glaucoma monitoring challenge by NHS Scotland and funded by the Scottish Health Industry Partnership. The challenge includes two validation studies of remote monitoring concepts to ease pressure on the NHS and offers the opportunity for national procurement.
Glaucoma is the UK’s leading cause of irreversible blindness. It is a common eye condition which affects 2% of the population over the age of 40. Across UK NHS Trusts, that amounts to over 500,000 patients requiring over 2 million hospital visits per year. Glaucoma patients require lifelong follow-up placing a significant strain on NHS resources. Due to the vast number of patients with this condition, clinics are often oversubscribed, leading to delays in assessment and potentially irreversible vision loss. Given that the number of patients with glaucoma is projected to increase by 44% in the next 15 years, innovative solutions and more efficient care pathways are needed.
During the summer of 2022, NHS Scotland opened a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) with the aim to develop innovative solutions focused on home (or near-patient) glaucoma monitoring to better identify patients at risk of losing vision, and to reduce the individual and societal costs of sight loss. The modalities of interest include home tonometry, home assessment of visual function and potentially optic disc imaging. It also includes developing methods of securely storing, transferring, and analysing the large number of home measurements obtained. The Scottish Health Industry Partnership will invest up to GBP 210K into the selected technologies across both phases of this two-phase national procurement challenge.
With its strong capabilities in the development of artificial intelligence algorithms along the functional eye testing workflow (measurement, quality control, analysis) and state-of-the-art software tools, PeriVision was selected to participate. PeriVision’s patented visual field testing strategy SORS, which drastically reduces test time and was previously validated in clinical studies at the University Hospital Bern, could make home-testing much more feasible. Together with additional AI algorithms to understand disease progression more deeply, PeriVision’s technology could help to make glaucoma monitoring much more patient-friendly and cost-effective.
