Wang Hui (L), president of Alcon China and Wang Hang, founder of haodf.com sign agreement to cooperate on internet-plus eye health education platform in Beijing on Firday. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Alcon Laboratories, Inc. China (Alcon China) and haodf.com signed an agreement to contribute each other's resources to build an internet-plus eye health education platform to better promote eye health knowledge to the public in Beijing on Friday.

Alcon China opened its first Alcon Experience Center in China in January and introduced world's leading eye instrument and training systems to provide medics a real operational environment to practice. In terms of the internet, Alcon China opened Alcon Experience Academy (AEA), an free online education platform integrating top expertise and knowledge from home and abroad to cultivate promising talent in the field of eye health.

According to a white paper on China's eye health issued by the National Health Commission in June, shortsightedness is the most common eye disease while cataracts are the top cause of blindness in the country. The incidence of shortsightedness among youths is 53.6 percent while that of those on campus is as high as more than 90 percent. The occurrence of cataracts among people aged above 60 is more than 80 percent. In contrast, there are only 44,800 eye doctors and only 6,000 optometrists nationwide.

The increasing use of smaller screens like cellphones or tablet PC due to social distance caused by the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak is worsening people's eye health as xerophthalmia is on the rise. However, the public doesn't realize it is a disease which they should be concerned about.

Wang Hui, president of Alcon China, said the experience center and academy will be committed to both pursuing professional education and public education, and called for people to know more about their eyes. Through a well-developed medical resource online platform like haodf.com, according to Wang Hui, Alcon aims to share their educational resources to enable doctors to better serve patients and promote scientific and standard eye health care knowledge to the public.

A visitor experiences a VR eye operation at Alcon Experience Center in Beijing. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Online medical care is supported by the government level to optimize and allocate medical resources to all. Wang Hang, founder of haodf.com, said sustainable eye health management and complete eye health knowledge are badly needed and the cooperation with Alcon is aiming to fill the gap in a format accessible to all. An medical resource online platform is the first choice that people turn to when encountering an unknown problem before going further to visit doctors or take medicine, and haodf.com is playing the role of sorting patients' needs and pairing them with appropriate doctors.

Founded in 2006, haodf.com has 230,000 registered doctors who have served 67 million patients till now and the website gets 3 million visitors per day on average.

Qiao Chunyan, deputy dean of the clinic of Beijing Tongren Hopsital, China's top eye health and disease hospital, said eye health is becoming ever important as the COVID-19 may pose long-standing challenges and more platforms like AEA are needed to provide a full range of support to foster more professional eye medics.

US-based Alcon, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, entered China in 1995 and has been working with China's leading medical institute on cataract treatment and care.
 

(China Daily)