UCI Health Gavin Herbert Eye Institute’s Post

Transcript

We have a strong tradition of hiring great clinicians. They're dedicated to their patients. Thirteen of those physicians have been named by Orange County Medical Association as Physicians of Excellence. 11 have been ranked by Caslon Connolly as top doctors in the country. My name is Barry Cooperman. I'm the director of the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute and Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology here at UC Irvine School of Medicine. My start off with a PhD in visual neuroscience at Caltech, then went to medical school, did internship and residency at USC, which was then Doheny Eye Institute. Then went to Baltimore from my retina fellowship and then TC San Diego for another year of retina fellowship. So I'm a retina trained. Clinician, but also a researcher so I have had an active clinical practice here at the university, but also I've done a lot of clinical research as well as basic research in a laboratory here at UC Irvine. We're very proud of our high volume and rapid growth at the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute. We're now over 90,000 patients seen per year, over 5000 surgeries per year with. A remarkable growth curve behind that. We are the busiest clinical unit at the UCI Health, where the busiest surgical unit UCI Health and we continue to grow at double digit rates, which is quite remarkable. A lot of that is because of the quality of care that we provide to our patients. We're very proud to have recruited Dr. Mishra from Johns Hopkins to come to UCI to be Hour and Orange County's first ocular oncologist. It's a small subspecialty, but a critical subspecialty. Now ocular oncology or cancers of the eye are a complex set of diseases. They focus around melanomas of the choroid, the back part of the eye, and has specialized treatments. So we do this in collaboration with radiation oncology. And I'm very pleased about the support we receive from the leadership and for the Department of Radiation Oncology as we collaborate together to take care of these complex patients that need the highest level of care. That is not even offered at every institution, only at specialized institutions. So this is a new era for us. There's a lot of talk about cancer care in Orange County. This is something that provides us with a unique status. We're the only ones to be able to provide care for our patients with eye tumors. We've risen in the ranks dramatically in our research funding from the National Institute and the National Institutes of Health. That has been candidly a focus of mine since becoming chair eight years ago, 7 1/2 years ago, where I felt that we had a very strong clinical. Unit and a strong but a potential for more growth on the research side. Partnering with Dean Stamos, Dean of the School of Medicine, who's been very generous in his collaboration with us, we've been able to recruit some of the most famous scientists in the world to come to UCI, to the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute. And we now have as a result of that, rankings that are in the top 20, whereas before we were ranked more in the. Top 40 or so. So we've increased our ranking. Our goal is to be top 10 ranking in NIH funding compared to other departments of ophthalmology. The focus has really been on what we call the Center for Translational Vision Research, which is a world class Research Center led by Doctor Chris Palczewski, who is a world class retinal pharmacologist, may be the most famous in the world. So we're on a great trajectory for growth and we hope to continue that. Again, the goal in the next 5 years is to double in size once again, to continue to provide the highest level of care both in current care for our patients, but also to advance the opportunities for new treatments for. Previously untreatable diseases through our research that we do here as well.