About

Owl Watch is an organization started by students at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine working in conjunction with the school’s Ophthalmology Student Interest Group (OSIG). We’re a diverse team of first, second, third, and fourth year medical students with a common goal of expanding primary eye care services to the Philadelphia community.

We saw a lack of basic eye care among many members of the North Philadelphia community firsthand during our clinical rotations. Considering that 42% of people with diabetes don’t get an annual eye exam and 12% of people in the U.S. have an uncorrected refractive error, we knew that there was room to make a difference for members of our community – people who are disproportionately affected by diabetes and inadequate access to healthcare.

To overcome barriers to eye care in Philadelphia.

Currently, we are providing visual acuity and diabetic retinopathy screening to members of the North Philadelphia community.

We work with Temple Emergency Action Corps (TEAC) at the One Day At A Time (ODAAT) homeless shelter to provide visual acuity and diabetic retinopathy screening to people experiencing homelessness. At ODAAT, we distribute reading glasses and work with TEAC to provide prescription glasses for distance vision. We connect residents of the shelter with ophthalmologists for further eye examination and treatment as needed.

We also manage a network of student volunteers who screen patients at Temple clinics for diabetic retinopathy (DR). We screen for DR by taking fundus photos of patients with diabetes, and analyze them using Eyenuk AI technology. We are currently screening for DR at the following clinics: Temple General Internal Medicine, Temple Family and Community Medicine, and Temple Endocrinology. We are looking forward to expanding our DR screening services to more Temple clinics!

We are excited about providing these screening services to the North Philly community – but this is just the beginning. If you have ideas about additional ways we can overcome barriers to eye care in our community, we’d love to hear from you!