Hi, this is Dr. Scott Morris. This is the audio recording for my column in April of 2026. And I have a question for you and the question is, will I care providers be the Oracle with the keys to what value-based medicine will look like in the future?
So think about it like this. Imagine a patient sitting in your exam chair. Now for years you've been the person who helps them see the world. But as we stand in 2026, a quiet revolution has turned that exam chair into the most powerful diagnostic seat in all medicine.
For decades, we've called the eye the window to the soul. Yet in practice, we mainly use it to check the, say, the front room. Tracking in Lidilgol, Koma here, Cornel abrasion there. We were the technicians of sight, the guardians of a single sense.
Well, I think that air is over. We are going to kind of take a shift. And the whole way of practicing, let's call evidence-based medicine, often lag behind specialties like cardiology or oncology because it relied on snapshots. You know, a single IOP reading or a single OCT scan that might not represent the patient's reality 99% of the year.
Well, AI is changing that math by applying deep learning to high resolution imaging. We've moved from subjective eyeballing to hyper quantitative evidence. AI doesn't just see a leaky vessel. It quantifies microvascular branching and vessel caliber.
With the precision human eyes simply cannot replicate. Normal is no longer a broad range. It's a personalized baseline making our evidence predictive rather than just reactive. So think of us as kind of the oracle because of the ocular part of the eye.
So the retina is the only place on earth where we can non-invasively watch the body's microvascular and neural tissue in its native in vivo state. This is the heart of oculomics because of AI we're no longer waiting for a patient to fail a visual field. Instead we see the evidence of a stroke or renal failure or neurodegenerative disease written in the architecture of the retinal neurofibre layer years in advance. We evolved into the primary care of the future, catching systemic diseases in the subclinical phase.
You know, the exact moment when interventions are most successful and also least expensive. So maybe in the future we are going to be creating the true value and this is where I care finally claims it's seed at the head of value-based medicine. In a world where value equals outcomes divided by cost, we the I care world may have just become the ultimate efficiency engine. Instead of the efficiency of seeing a patient every six months, AI now allows for risk stratified scheduling.
Now we can identify the fast progressors you need is immediately and monitor the stable patients maybe remotely or less often. Optimizing our chair time while slashing systemic costs, the true value of the let's call it ocular oracle is what doesn't happen. When you say I did detect early hypertensive retinopathy and you trigger primary care intervention, you aren't just saving a set of eyes or a retina, you're saving the healthcare system $100,000 stroke or years of dialysis. The standard of care is no longer defined by the trial frame in your lane or the foropter on the stand, but the data in the cloud.
We must move past the fear that AI is a replacement and realize it's the infrastructure that elevates the I care profession. We're the architects of a new standard. Every time we lean into the slant lamp, we're performing a nonvasive biopsy of a human beings entire vascular and neurological system. The data is here, the technology is ready.
The eye exam is now the most critical 15 minutes in a patient's annual health journey. The time for I care to lead is right now.