Optometric Management caught up with Cory Lappin, OD, at the Lumenis Accelerate Owner’s Summit in Chicago on August 28 to discuss what knowledge about OptiLight and OptiLift attendees could take away from the event

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Optometric Management: Hi, I'm Sarah Fackler. I'm the managing editor of Optometric Management magazine, and I'm here in Chicago with Dr. Cory Lappin at the Luminous Accelerate event. We are going to be talking about all of Dr. Lappin's sessions today on OptiLift and OptiLight. Dr. Lappin, take it away.

Cory Lappin, OD: First of all, I’m super excited to be talking about this because this is a really cool event. For those of you who don't know, this is a weekend that's dedicated to learning more about Lumenis' technology for dry eye specifically.

A lot of people are probably familiar with OptiLight, which is intense pulsed light (IPL). It’s still newer, but it has been around for a while. One of the unique things then too is we now have OptiLift, which is dynamic muscle stimulation (DMSt). This whole weekend encompasses a wide range of topics, and I have several different sessions today with different focuses, one of which is the practice management side.

It's kind of a new concept still, relatively speaking, to bring in a procedure that you're doing in the office in optometry. This is still relatively early and these procedures aren't typically covered by insurance, so navigating them can be a little bit different. But one of the big takeaways I will want from that particular session is how to talk to your patients about it, how to structure your workflow, and how to set aside time for these procedures. Some of the practical tips we want people to take away this weekend is, for instance, what bringing in IPL with OptiLight looks like and how to talk with patients about navigating the fact that this is going to be a self-pay procedure.

Those are all questions that are really common, but I'm hoping that doctors come away from this event being more confident in talking to their patients about it and just knowing how it can integrate into a practice flow.

Another really exciting thing about this weekend is we're going to talk a lot about OptiLift and DSMt, which, as I said, is a very new technology in eye care. What I often talk about for this is that it’s going to be a very different approach than what we've had before. IPL with OptiLight is great, but I will say it is a light-based treatment, so it's going to fundamentally work differently than something like DMSt, which is focused on, as the name implies, the muscles, specifically the muscles of the eyelid that allow us to blink. A lot of patients now—I would probably even venture to say maybe the majority of patients with dry eye—have some abnormal blinking mechanics. Lid laxity or loose lids is the big one we talk about.

OptiLift has a small electrical current that actually contracts the muscles around the eye. It's kind of like a TENS unit. I like that as an example to understand how it works. That muscle contraction actually strengthens the muscles of the eyelid so you get better blinking and better lid tone that potentially help with dryness because you're getting a better distribution spread and secretion of tears on the surface of the eye.

I'm excited because it's a new technology, and I know people are excited to learn about it, so I'm hoping people come away with just a better understanding of the technology and the part that it specifically will play in dry eye treatment.