How AI Is Making Retina Practices More Efficient: Aaron Lee, MD, MSCI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already making retina practices more efficient, and soon “it’s going to be actually very hard to take care of patients without using AI,” according to Aaron Y. Lee, MD, MSCI, chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Washington University (WashU) Medicine, who spoke at the American Academy of Ophthalmology 2026 Annual Meeting.

Lee highlighted 3 areas where he sees AI playing a transformative role. The first is ambient AI that listens to clinician-patient conversations and automatically drafts the clinical note. After WashU partnered with Abridge, a study showed a 20% reduction in the time it takes to finish a note. Within the first few months, clinicians also saw an increase in relative value units.¹

The second is intelligent referral triage, in which AI reads incoming faxed referrals and automatically routes patients based on how soon they need to see a retina specialist. The third is AI running behind the scenes, analyzing every
optical coherence tomography scan, visual field, and Optos image to prepare results for clinician use.

Clinicians may not even realize AI is working in the background, such as on the scheduling side to reduce no-show rates, Lee said. Health care is full of “low-hanging fruit,” with many problems that “could probably be solved almost completely using AI.”

The biggest barrier, Lee said, is “this last mile problem” of plugging the technology into everyday clinical practice. Electronic health record vendors “haven’t really exposed the internals of their systems to allow these AI agent tools to be able to plug in and use them efficiently,” he said. Lee added that the medical community needs to work with industry partners to close that gap.

Looking ahead, he said the future is hard to predict because “AI is moving so fast.” The tools that he described can be used today and tested over the next year, “but the next couple of years may be very, very hard to predict.”

Reference

WashU Medicine and BJC Health bring Abridge to 4,000 clinicians. News release. Business Wire. September 2, 2026. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260902105266/en/WashU-Medicine-and-BJC-Health-Bring-Abridge-to-4000-Clinicians