Interview of the month - Laura Mauring

 Every month, ERN-EYE invites you to meet an active person within the network through a short interview. This month, it's Laura Mauring, ERN-EYE medical fellow, who accepted to answer our questions.

"The best advantage of the ERN-EYE network is that we can work together and the major experts of the Europe can work together."

My name is Laura Mauring and I'm the medical fellow of the ERN-EYE. I am part of the helpdesk team with our IT specialist, so we are
two, we are helping the users with the CPMS, the virtual clinic or the clinical patient management system. So the IT specialist is more involved with
technical issues like logging on to the system and creating new panels and I am helping the users with our ophtalmological dataset which is quite thorough. If needed I can also approach different members individually to ask them to participate in a complete panel - according to their expertise or the research that they have done.

In your opinion what is the most important issue ERN-EYE could overcome?

So of course ERN-EYE has many technical issues that need to be overcome, for example getting enough users to the CPMS which is quite a good system, means it is a very thorough one, and it seems to be complicated but it really isn't if you get used to it. But the real question is how to really kickstart the CPMS. We still have quite many users but we don't have that many panels as we should actually because there are many questions in I'm sure in every center or expertise that could be asked for their patients but really CPMS is not necessarily used as a part of a patient management right now what it should be actually. It should be the last instance what you get help for your patient.

What are the main challenges for the network?
One of the challenges is already overcome, so as I said, about virtual clinic, this is already working well actually in the practice. But we also have the rare eye disease registry that needs to be created as well as the guidelines and I see a lot of people, a lot of experts working like really hard everyday and also the team in Strasbourg. But we have still very limited time to make this registry and to create those guidelines and I'm afraid that the time might be too limited to be on the schedule.

And the best advances of the network?

I think the best advantage of the ERN-EYE network is that we can work together and the major experts of the Europe can work together and anything that we create like the guidelines that they are created within the network are really thought through and consensual.

In your dreams what would ERN-EYE look like in ten years?

So in ten years I think the CPMS could be already a part of clinical practice really automatically and I think at this time we should already be seeing the real cost effectiveness of the system. I think the registry of rare eye disease would be ready at this time and should be used all over the Europe. So we would have a really clear idea what is going on with rare eye disease in Europe. In addition to this I think we would have many guidelines already in ten years so we could help the doctors to make decisions for their patients who are dealing with the rare eye diseases.


  

Watch the interview of Laura Maring in video