How do pledges become patient care?
The summit asked for commitments that are specific, funded, and time bound. Cherwek pointed to Orbis’s pledge to train 250,000 health professionals by 2030 through Cybersight, its free distance learning platform. Cybersight, launched almost 25 years ago, now serves everyone from school teachers to gene therapy subspecialists. Alcon has also pledged to join the educational commitment and build centers of excellence in Egypt and Peru, as it has in India.
Delivering on those pledges comes down to accountability, according to Cherwek. Orbis and IAPB plan check-ins and roundtables with partners, and Orbis has begun building budgets and plans around its pledge. “I think the resources are too small and the challenge is too big to try to do this alone,” he said.
How can capacity be built where it is needed most?
For cataract and trachoma, Cherwek said the biggest gap is human resources. Orbis takes a team approach that includes community health workers, optometrists, and surgical nurses, whom he called the most underrated members of the team. That is paired with blended learning through Cybersight and surgical simulators, as well as “sandwich fellowships,” in which a trainee’s professor visits the trainee’s home center 3 to 4 months after the fellowship to help close remaining gaps.
Cherwek described Cybersight’s artificial intelligence (AI), which he said is, to his knowledge, the first freely available AI for posterior segment diagnosis. It runs daily in countries such as Mongolia and Vietnam, and trials in Bangladesh and Rwanda have examined its effects on hospital productivity and referral compliance. Rather than a yes-or-no result for diabetic retinopathy, the algorithms highlight disease so nurses and technicians learn to read the images, an approach Orbis calls machine mentoring. “Our algorithms are not just red light, green light,” he said. Oculomics research, using retinal imaging to predict systemic health, is underway in sub-Saharan Africa.
“I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time to be in ophthalmology,” Cherwek said.
