The rising trend in academic ophthalmology urgent care

When dogma doesn’t match data

At one major academic medical center, the long-held belief by the ophthalmology department leadership was that ophthalmology call volume had stayed constant. While the residents complained that the workload “felt heavier,” nobody had been able to examine the numbers. That’s where EyeQ stepped in. By structuring and analyzing years of emergency department and consult data, we were able to answer a question that had lingered for years: was the call truly heavier, or did it just feel that way? When the numbers were finally revealed, the long-standing dogma didn’t hold up.

What the data showed
Over a five-year period, ophthalmology emergency room consults increased at an average rate of 15% per year, while total ER visits rose just 3%. Put simply, ophthalmology consults grew five times faster than the emergency department overall. The growth was coming from two trends, 1) an increase in the sheer number of eye complaints showing up in the emergency room, and 2) an increased rate of emergency room doctors consulting ophthalmologists – even if the number of eye complaints hadn’t increased. Overall, the increased on-call burden wasn’t just perception, it was measurable…and accelerating.