The inaugural ME Live was a truly unique meeting run by and designed for Gen X/Gen Y ophthalmologists. The meeting was small, intimate, and highly interactive. Social media played a big role in ME Live, including the use of a Twitter feed for audience participation. Five residents received grants to attend the meeting and were selected based on submitted abstracts. The resident grant recipients were acknowledged at ME Live, had their abstracts included in the meeting app and in MillennialEYE, and attended the meeting. It was an amazing opportunity. One of the selected residents, Peter Coombs, MD, comments on his experience below.
–Jessica Ciralsky, MD
I first heard about MillennialEYE and ME Live when one of our attendings at Cornell shared the MillennialEYE grant contest with the residents. I decided to apply for the grant to attend ME Live when I saw that one of the abstract topics was “novel therapeutic approaches to disease management.” I had been working on writing the first case report of a patient who received cytomegalovirus (CMV)-specific T-lymphocyte infusions for the treatment of CMV retinitis. We’ve now had several patients at Cornell, in coordination with doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, undergo this new treatment. Essentially, immunocompromised patients with severe CMV retinitis, systemic CMV viremia, and some with CMV resistance to all of our typical antivirals, have had complete resolution of their disease with these T-cell infusions. It is certainly a novel and exciting treatment in the field of ophthalmology for this potentially blinding infection, and I thought that it would be the perfect thing to share with MillennialEYE.
Dr.Coombs accepts his award certificate from the ME Live Program Chairs.
The residents selected to attend ME Live being acknowledged at the meeting.
ME Live was like no other meeting I had been to previously. It featured ophthalmologists from academia and private practices as well as members of industry. There was a focus on new advances in ophthalmology, especially cutting-edge technology, and how they can be used in practice. The topics covered ranged from OR efficiency to patient care experience and communication to advances in glaucoma and dry eye treatment. There was also practical information for a young ophthalmologist starting out in practice. The meeting was relatively small, which allowed me to meet just about everyone in attendance, including the presenters and industry representatives, over dinner following the day’s program.
There were five other residents, from programs all over the United States and in Canada, selected to receive a grant to attend the meeting. I had the chance to meet and talk with all of them. I was honored with a formal mention during the meeting’s opening session, an award certificate, and a feature in the ME Live meeting app and MillennialEYE publication.
