Orbis featured in second Meta ad campaign

The second phase of Meta's "Impact Is Real" campaign takes a deeper dive into how the unique tool we developed with FundamentalVR, which helps doctors in under-resourced communities grow their cataract surgical skills using virtual reality, is already making a difference in eye care.

The new campaign highlights two incredible eye care professionals in the Orbis community: Dr. Glenn Strauss and Dr. Anushree Baid. Dr. Strauss has been an Orbis Volunteer Faculty for many years and has been involved in the development of our VR tool since its inception. With decades of surgery under his belt, Dr. Strauss knows practice makes perfect. He says, "As you practice each skill, the muscle memory starts to develop.” This leads to more confident doctors and better access for patients.

Dr. Strauss also mentors ophthalmologists who are growing their skills using the VR equipment. One of those eye doctors is Dr. Anushree Baid, a resident at Orbis partner hospital Dr. Shroff's Charity Eye Hospital in India. Dr. Baid has been using our VR tool to hone her skills in cataract surgery, since cataract remains the leading cause of blindness worldwide despite being treatable with a short procedure. She told us, “VR let me practice hundreds of times before I operated on a patient." With that training, Dr. Baid was able to perform 300 life-changing surgeries last year, brightening lives around India.

The Orbis-FundamentalVR simulator, which teaches surgeons how to perform a fundamental cataract surgery that does not require high-cost technologies, has already been deployed in several countries, including Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, and Mongolia. The tool was specifically designed with affordability and scalability in mind so that the benefits of cutting-edge VR technology can reach doctors in low- and middle-income countries — home to nine out of 10 people with vision loss.

Dr. Hunter Cherwek, Orbis’s Vice President of Clinical Services and Technologies, explains, "Existing cataract training VR simulators were expensive, not transportable, not easily sourced, and trained doctors on a surgical method usually only practiced in high-resource areas, so we saw a real need that we could meet together."

Richard Vincent, Co-Founder & CEO of FundamentalVR, says, "Our platform opens a world of possibilities, and we are very proud to collaborate with partners like Orbis that want to revolutionize and globalize surgical training with us."

Read more about our partnership with FundamentalVR here.

We would like to give a huge thank you to Meta for featuring our work in their campaign, and to all our supporters who make this work possible. Thanks to you, doctors in low- and middle-income countries around the world can access cutting-edge surgical training tools.