About the
Vision Academy
Our Mission Statement
The Vision Academy provides ophthalmic specialists with a forum to share existing skills and knowledge, provide consensus guidance for managing clinically challenging situations, and lead the wider community in the drive toward optimized, compassionate patient care.
About us
The Vision Academy is a group of over 100 international ophthalmology experts who, through their collective expertise, provide consensus guidance for managing clinically challenging situations, especially in areas of controversy or with insufficient conclusive evidence.
Challenging clinical situations
Our members share ideas about challenging clinical situations and form working groups dedicated to providing consensus recommendations on that specific challenge. Each set of recommendations undergoes endorsement by the Vision Academy’s membership ahead of being shared with the wider ophthalmic community in a peer-reviewed publication.
Special Interest Groups
The Vision Academy’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are focused on up-and-coming areas of importance to the ophthalmic community. Our SIGs, consisting of Vision Academy members with a keen interest in these areas, are dedicated to keeping their finger on the pulse of emerging trends and providing quarterly updates on the most relevant outputs in the field.
AI coming soon
Collaboration
The Barometer Program and the Vision Academy are complementary initiatives supported by Bayer, committed to driving toward optimized, compassionate, patient-focused care for retinal disease. Comprising world-renowned global experts in the fields of retinal disease, vision, diabetes care, and aging, these groups work synergistically to provide consensus guidance in patient care.
The Barometer Program
The Barometer Program is a global initiative to improve the vision health of millions of patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy (DR), and diabetic macular edema. The Barometer Leadership Coalition, a global group of 23 experts that includes independent clinicians and representatives from the International Federation on Ageing (IFA) and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), provides oversight and strategic direction across the program.
This flagship advocacy program operates across many workstreams to develop robust evidence and provide meaningful recommendations promoting the patient perspective, such as several peer-reviewed publications on patient-focused clinical management, the “A Chat with Anat” podcast series, and informational materials for ophthalmologists who are interested in improving delivery of care and patient outcomes.
Partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
The IFA’s mission is to drive the agenda for the aging population across the world to ensure that every older person can live their life to the full. The IFA has become an invaluable partner through its work in the DR arm of the Barometer Program. Together, they have spearheaded not one but two global surveys in recent years and have recently embarked on formally documenting the referral pathways that patients with DR experience in various countries around the world.
The IAPB’s objective is to raise the profile of eye care among key international institutions and the public. For the past 8 years, Bayer has been a proud supporter of the IAPB as a World Sight Day Global Partner, in which the Love Your Eyes campaign in 2021 saw over 3 million people pledging to “love their eyes” by booking a sight test.
Bayer is proud to support these groundbreaking initiatives that bring together expertise and patient advocacy to listen to patients in a meaningful way, and has been delighted to see these collaborations go from strength to strength.
The Barometer Program is managed by clinical leaders in ophthalmology as well as representatives from the IFA, IAPB, International Diabetes Federation (IDF), and Bayer. The activities of the Barometer Program are funded and facilitated by Bayer, while the scientists and representatives from the IFA, IAPB, and IDF retain decision authority regarding the research scope, methods, analysis of findings, and dissemination of the Program’s outputs.
