Symposium 5 – Innovations in Service Models

High-volume ophthalmic services face growing pressure from aging populations and chronic eye disease burdens. Traditional care models struggle to meet the demand – globally, over 2.2 billion people have a vision impairment and specialist resources remain limited. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), offer transformative potential to augment eye care delivery. This presentation will introduce LLMs in healthcare and ophthalmology, illustrating how these intelligent systems can interpret clinical data, converse naturally, and support decision-making. We will survey cutting-edge global applications of LLMs in ophthalmology – from automated retinal image interpretation and screening triage, to clinical decision support and multi-modal data integration combining text and images. Notable benchmarks demonstrate LLM capabilities approaching specialist-level performance. At the same time, we address current challenges including data privacy, ethics, and real-world implementation barriers. The talk aligns these innovations with China's national AI strategy and with Hong Kong's digital health policies for use of generative AI. We will share our institution's experience in developing ChatZOC, China's first ophthalmic LLM, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in ophthalmic tasks, and a successful LLM-powered eye health assistant that has facilitated over a million patient interactions. Finally, we highlight the tangible impacts on care delivery, efficiency, and patient outcomes, and discuss future directions and collaboration opportunities to harness intelligent solutions for accessible, efficient, and high-quality ophthalmic care at scale.

利用数码工具治疗儿童哮喘
本项目构建数字化哮喘管理平台，将数字化技术应用于哮喘患者的诊前、诊中和诊后，实现儿童哮喘个体化闭环管理。
诊前，填写预问诊，生成结构化电子病历，并应用哮喘诊断模型预测概率，辅助医生诊疗；应用AR眼镜指导肺功能操作，配合人工智能辅助肺功能质控与判读技术，实现快速判读。
诊中，确诊后规范化建档，评估病程阶段、控制情况及生命质量，并进行健康宣教。
居家，肺功能、症状实时监测，实现AI预警，医生可发送指导意见并提供远程医疗服务。
通过患者的数据分析，发现儿童哮喘数字化管理平台有利于提高哮喘患儿的门诊随诊依从性，改善肺功能水平，并提升哮喘控制水平和生活质量，有利于儿童哮喘的有效规范化管理。

Cataract surgery is one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide. It is highly successful and brings about visual restoration, improved cognitive function and quality of life. The ageing population means a higher demand for cataract surgery. This together with as yet unresolved pandemic backlog poses a huge challenge to healthcare systems including the Hospital Authority.


How can we address this challenge to provide timely care, improved throughput with minimal increase in resources, safeguard quality and safety and at the same time protect surgical training and not cause fatigue to staff?


We examine what takes up time in operating sessions. Pure cataract surgery lists, cutting down turnover time, reducing redundant steps, and have patients self-prepare for surgery can all help. Teamwork and trust in the team, clear division of labour, pooled waiting list, can all improve throughput to a minimum of two routine cases or equivalent per hour. A change of mindset is necessary to allow the above to take place.


We will explore concepts of risk stratification, graded training, immediately sequential bilateral cataract surgery (ISBCS), conditional probability, cataract surgery by appointment, and doing without Day 1, Week 1 and Week 4 post-operative follow-up.