Screening Questionnaire for Preoperative Medical Evaluation for Ocular Surgical Procedures

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Value Proposition

• Identifies patients who require medical evaluation prior to cataract surgery and other low medical risk surgical procedures, ensuring patient safety while enabling low-risk patients to proceed directly to surgery.

• Reduces unnecessary preoperative medical evaluation, reduces healthcare costs, minimizes patient and provider burdens, and streamlines surgical scheduling.

Unmet Need

• Prior to cataract surgery and other low medical risk surgical procedures, healthcare institutions and surgeons must determine whether patients require a comprehensive medical evaluation. Many healthcare institutions and surgeons default to requiring all patient to undergo preoperative such evaluations, leading to overuse. This overuse leads to unnecessary costs, delayed care, increased patient and provider burden, increased risk of injury due to the surgical delay, and disrupted surgical scheduling. In other settings, the decision of whether to require a preoperative medical evaluation is left to individual healthcare institutions and surgeons. There is a lack of a widely adopted, vetted, and scalable screening tool to determine whether patients would benefit from a comprehensive medical evaluation prior to cataract surgery and other low medical risk surgical procedures.

Technology Description

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed an 11-question preoperative screening questionnaire (PQ) designed to be administered by clerical scheduling staff over the phone in jargon-free English. The PQ identifies the minority of patients who may benefit from a comprehensive medical evaluation prior to cataracts surgery and other low medical risk surgical procedures, while allowing the majority of low-risk patients to proceed directly to surgery without preoperative medical evaluation. Data and pilot testing demonstrate that over 80% of cataract surgery patients screened healthy enough to safely bypass the preoperative medical evaluation.

Stage of Development

• The disclosed technology is fully vetted and currently in use for triaging patients for medical evaluation before cataract surgery and other low medical risk surgical procedures at the Wilmer Eye Institute and other JHUSOM-affiliated surgical centers.