Inoveon
Completes 10,000th Evaluation to Help Prevent Blindness from
Diabetic Retinopathy
American
Diabetes Association survey ranks blindness as the top
concern among people with diabetes
For
Immediate Release: October 2,
2002
Media Contact: Lloyd Hildebrand, Chief Medical
Officer | 1.405.271.9025 | lloyd-hildebrand@inoveon.com
OKLAHOMA CITY (October 2, 2002) Inoveon Corporation, a medical services company specializing in detecting, staging and monitoring diseases affecting the eye, announced today the company has completed the 10,000th evaluation of patients with diabetes as part of its effort to improve the management of diabetic retinopathy. A microvascular complication that usually occurs without symptoms, diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness among working age adults in industrialized countries.
"Since implementing the Inoveon 3DT system, our compliance rate for annual eye evaluations of patients with diabetes has jumped from less than 30 percent to 80 percent," says Dr. Boyd Shook, Associate Chief of Staff for Ambulatory Care at the Oklahoma City VA Medical Center, which has been using the Inoveon system since November 1999. "Our patients have been very positive about the Inoveon technology and know we're going beyond the usual steps to help them manage diabetes and reduce the risk of blindness."
According to HEDIS reports from the National Center for Quality Assurance (NCQA), only 45 percent of people with diabetes in the United States receive the annual diabetic retinopathy exam recommended by the American Academy of Ophthalmology and American Diabetes Association. Furthermore, the compliance rate drops dramatically in subsequent years. As a result, retinopathy leads to 40,000 cases of blindness and 160,000 cases of moderate vision loss each year according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In March 2002, the peer-review publication Ophthalmology published the findings of a clinical validation study of Inoveon 3DT technology, which achieved 98.2 percent sensitivity, and 89.7 percent specificity when compared to the "gold standard" established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for detection and staging of vision threatening retinopathy.
According to Dr. Frederick Ferris, Director of the Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the NIH National Eye Institute (NEI), knowing the stage of retinopathy is critical to initiating appropriate treatment. The problem, he says, there simply aren't regular qualified retinal evaluations for each patient.
"There are effective treatments for patients with diabetes, but many patients are not receiving these treatments," says Ferris. "We need validated screening programs like this to assure help for patients on a national scale. Only by solving that problem will we be able to effectively offer treatments proven to prevent blindness."
The Inoveon 3DT platform is a patented digital evaluation service for diabetic retinopathy that produces images in seven areas of each eye offering a less expensive, more efficient solution for primary care physicians to detect, track and manage patients with diabetic retinopathy. Patients with diabetes undergo a safe, non-invasive retinal scan at a local Inoveon Patient Service Center. The images are transmitted electronically to the Inoveon Evaluation Center for analysis. A comprehensive report with a disease management recommendation is sent back to the primary care physician within 48 hours.
"For more than 25 years, ophthalmologists have known how to prevent most of the blindness from diabetic retinopathy but it's still the leading cause of blindness among working-age Americans," says Dr. Stephen Fransen, Inoveon co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. "A major reason for our failure to prevent blindness is that patients simply aren't being evaluated and therefore can't get the proper treatment. That's why we created the Inoveon technology platform and service center model."
Founded in 1997, Inoveon's mission is to deliver high quality, comprehensive, services to detect, stage and monitor diseases of the eye including diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, glaucoma and others. Its patented 3DT imaging technology and iScore" Diabetes Eye Evaluation Service improve the quality, economics, and medical outcomes of patients with diabetic retinopathy, a common complication of diabetes, and the leading cause of preventable blindness in the United States. To learn more about Inoveon, please visit www.inoveon.com.
- Related
file: Ophthalmology
(March 2002) NIH
Gold Standard Validation Study of Inoveon 3DT Technology
(96k PDF)