ESCRS 2023: Dr Amir Hamid praises the wide range of technologies on view

In early September, we visited Vienna, Austria, for the 41st annual European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (ESCRS) meeting. At this year's ESCRS congress, we caught up with Dr Amir Hamid, medical director of Optegra, London, UK. Our conversation was wide-ranging, because exhibitors showed off everything from lenses to lasers.

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Amir Hamid: My name is Amir Hamid. I'm the medical director for Optegra in the UK. What's great about the ESCRS is, it's the biggest conference for cataract and refractive surgery. And it allows us to share the results of the work that we've been doing for the last 12 months. But we also get to learn, from individuals and other groups in ophthalmology as well. So that's very exciting. And this is probably one of the biggest ESCRS conferences for several years now.

We at Optegra have been able to participate in the launches of several new products: the corneal refractive workplace and new trifocal lenses from BVI and also ZEISS. So, it's very interesting for us to be able to share with our colleagues the results of new technologies that are now becoming available after ESCRS.

It's been great to be able to share the results of BVI's new FINEVISION hp and hp toric intraocular lenses, their hydrophobic platform with a 4-point fixation. What we found is that they're very safe, very reliable, and very effective, but most importantly for our patients, excellent results and they're very, very happy.

We at Optegra work very closely with ZEISS, both with technologies, so for example, their refractive lasers, we use the Visumax 800, which is the latest femtosecond laser from ZEISS for SMILE Pro. We also use a lot of their new workflow solutions. And I've been able to pilot for example, this year, the corneal refractive workplace, which allows advanced planning for laser refractive surgery away from the operating room. We're mitigating against any transcription errors, and also saving time making things more efficient for you and your staff. And taking the stress away from [the] surgical list.

In the next year, I would say there's some really exciting developments in intraocular lens technologies. We see more and more new lenses coming out at faster rates than we've ever seen before. So extended depth-of-focus lenses and monofocal plus lenses really have increased the range of patients that we can offer a presbyopic solution to, where we wouldn't have in the past.