Manassas, VA, July 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Notal Vision, Inc., a company focused on advancing eye care with precision medicine by extending disease management from the clinic to the home, celebrates the completion of six million patient tests performed with ForeseeHome, the first FDA-cleared home-monitoring device for patients with intermediate dry Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) at risk for developing wet AMD. ForeseeHome uses a patented technology, Preferential Hyperacuity Perimetry® (PHP), that can identify minute changes in the central 14 degrees of visual field before the patient has any visual symptoms. During the test, which takes about three minutes, the central macula is evaluated for changes in metamorphopsia, distortion of the vision, caused by the onset of fluid in or under the retina. ForeseeHome testing results are sent to the Notal Vision Diagnostic Clinic (NVDC) via a cloud-based ecosystem. If there is a significant change in metamorphopsia, the adaptive test will generate an alert which is provided to the patient’s eye doctor by the NVDC. The patient is then evaluated by their doctor for progression from intermediate dry AMD to wet AMD. ForeseeHome’s clinical utility was established in the Home Monitoring of The Eye (HOME) Study, part of the National Eye Institute-sponsored AREDS2 study. The HOME study was halted at the interim analysis when patients using ForeseeHome demonstrated significantly better vision at wet AMD diagnosis compared with standard care. The ForeseeHome AMD Monitoring Program is covered by Medicare and most private insurance.
Notal Vision Diagnostic Clinic (NVDC), the company’s covered entity, provides holistic, beginning-to-end patient education and engagement, and physician support. “Patients require ongoing assistance and a positive and empowering experience to be successful across years of home diagnostic testing. Physicians require the patient’s home monitoring experience to reflect positively on them and their practice in addition to the medical benefit”, said Susan Orr, OD, Chief Executive Officer of Notal Vision. “Directed by practicing ophthalmologists and supported by a team of certified ophthalmic technicians and patient engagement specialists, the NVDC is a healthcare provider and the platform for patient and physician engagement”, Dr. Orr added.
ForeseeHome is the first home diagnostic product built on the NVDC infrastructure. The company is developing a second product, a home-based optical coherence tomography (OCT) system, that will also leverage the NVDC infrastructure. “The home OCT system will allow patients to perform self-operated home testing, and a proprietary artificial intelligence-based algorithm will identify, localize, and quantify fluid associated with retinal vascular diseases. The NVDC will then generate a fluid alert to the doctor, indicating the need to evaluate the Home OCT images and the patient,” said Dr. Orr. “We seek to lead the ophthalmic home diagnostic monitoring category, and our NVDC infrastructure helps move eye care towards individualized and optimized retinal disease management.”
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About Notal Vision
Notal Vision is a diagnostic services company with a proven platform for engaging patients and AI-enabled analyses of high-volume personalized health data that extends disease management from the clinic to the home to improve vision outcomes, reduce treatment burden, and improve health economics. www.notalvision.com
ForeseeHome is an FDA-cleared diagnostic that monitors visual changes in patients at risk of vision loss from undiagnosed wet AMD. ForeseeHome is covered by Medicare and most private insurances. To learn more, visit www.foreseehome.com.
Notal Vision’s Home OCT will enable exudative AMD patients to perform technician-free OCT testing at home with rapid, self-guided fixation – critical components, especially for elderly patients frequently with pre-existing vision loss. The Notal OCT Analyzer (NOATM), a proprietary machine-learning algorithm, developed in-house, performs automated analysis of the Home OCT scans and generates a report to the physician when a physician specified change in disease activity is detected. The Notal Vision Diagnostic Clinic sends reports to the treating physician which characterize quantitative changes in fluid. In addition, physicians will be provided 24/7 access to all B-scan images from each home OCT test with the location of the fluid annotated on each B-scan. Following physician receipt of an alert report, patients may be brought to the office for evaluation and treatment at the doctor’s discretion. NOA can also analyze the output of other commercial OCT devices, and published study data indicate that the performance of NOA in detecting disease activity was similar to that of retina physicians when each was compared to a panel of experts. Notal Vision’s Home OCT has the potential to truly individualize and advance retinal disease management.