access to safety-centered guidelines of care and feedback from col-
leagues from around the world. The society's membership now exceeds
150 physicians, with Americans accounting for 90% of members who
signed on over the last 2 years. Yes, interest in immediately sequential
bilateral cataract surgery is growing in the United States, where health-
care capitalism has surgeons looking for new ways of doing things to
gain even the slightest advantage over their competitors.
I co-authored a study in 2014 that assessed rates of endophthalmitis in
more than 100,000 eyes of patients who underwent same-day bilateral
cataract surgery. We noted infection rates of 1 in 17,000 patients instead
of the 1 in a few hundred or few thousand patients that's typical when
surgery is performed on one eye at a time. The results could have been
biased — only highly experienced surgeons performed the procedures
in high-functioning
facilities — but the
study does show that
the risk of infection is
small when skilled
physicians care for
patients in the right
clinical setting using
proven protocols.
Overall, the risks
associated with same-
day bilateral cataract
surgery are minimal,
but the risk of retinal
detachment is a con-
cern, especially in
myopic patients who
O C T O B E R 2 0 1 6 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 8 9
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