This transcript has been edited for clarity.  

Hi, my name is Aakriti Garg Shukla, MD. I’m an associate professor of ophthalmology at Columbia University. I’m a glaucoma and cataract surgeon, and I am at the American Glaucoma Society meeting in 2026 in Palm Springs, California. I just presented on “Sustainability in Glaucoma: Examples That Are Relevant to a Glaucoma Practice,” and I’d like you all to know that as the disease burden of glaucoma is increasing, so are the numbers of clinic visits, procedures, and surgeries we’re all doing.

As glaucoma specialists, we really have the outsized opportunity to make a meaningful impact in sustainability as it relates to health care. In the operating room (OR) setting, in the clinic setting, and of course in the pharmaceuticals that we use.

In the OR, we can consider reusing surgical products as appropriate. We can call on industry and regulators to decrease the amount of excessive packaging that we have in our OR products, such as surgical devices. We know those are very tiny, but the boxes they come in are rather large. We should look at our use of pharmaceuticals in the perioperative setting, in particular. The American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) recommends multidosing of pharmaceuticals in the perioperative setting. If you’re not multidosing, you’re probably throwing away $150 of medication with every cataract surgery you do, which accounts to hundreds of millions of dollars per year. And then finally, in the clinic setting, having patients come in frequently and travel far for their care are the primary drivers of inefficiency.

So it’s important for us to all think about sustainability. We're all good at maintaining vision for 30, 40, 50, 60 years. It's important for us to maintain the systems that help us deliver care as well.

Thanks for the opportunity to share, and I hope you had a great time at the meeting. GP