AAO 2026 is a wrap. More than 25,000 eye care professionals filled the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans from October 9 to 12, and the clinical program delivered the headlines you’d expect: artificial intelligence everywhere, a retina field moving toward longer-lasting and gene-based therapies, and interventional glaucoma gaining ground. Those advances matter. But from where we spent the week — on the Expo floor and in conversations with administrators and operations leaders — the story underneath the science was the business of running an ophthalmology practice, and how to keep it competitive and lean while the clinical and regulatory ground keeps shifting.
AI was the dominant theme of the meeting, and the conversation has clearly matured. The headline keynote put generative AI in health care front and center, and the question across the floor was less about whether the algorithms are accurate and more about how AI fits into real clinic and office workflows — including the back office. That second half is where practice leaders should lean in. AI isn’t only changing what happens in the exam lane; it’s starting to reshape documentation, scheduling, and the revenue cycle, which means it affects your staff as much as your patients. The practices that get ahead will be the ones that adopt AI where it genuinely reduces administrative burden without adding compliance risk — and that’s a decision administrators, not just clinicians, will own.
This year we were joined at our booth by Confido Health, our latest AI partnership. Confido builds agentic AI for healthcare operations, automating patient access and revenue cycle workflows — exactly the back-office work where AI can lighten the load on a stretched team. For practices exploring where AI fits, Confido is a capability we can factor into a practice performance consultation.
Retina durability and gene-based therapies were a constant across the program, and interventional glaucoma kept surfacing alongside a broader push on eye health and patient engagement. Even the purely clinical advances carry an operational tail: new therapies change drug billing, authorization, and documentation, and new procedures change scheduling and capacity. However the science moves, the practice still has to code it correctly and get paid for it.
AAO’s practice-management program maps almost exactly to what leaders are wrestling with — business and finance, practice efficiency and lean operations, technology, and more — and it showed. The steady traffic we saw came from practices looking for software and solutions that help them stay competitive and lean without adding headcount. The recurring theme was fewer vendors and systems that actually fit how eye care works, rather than generic healthcare tools bolted onto an ophthalmology practice. That’s the gap Revascent’s solutions built for ophthalmology practices are designed to close.
If one topic kept resurfacing, it was coding and compliance. It’s well represented in the program — coding and reimbursement, compliance and risk, and EHR/MIPS all sit inside the practice-management track — and the meeting even looked ahead to 2027 Medicare coverage. On the floor, it was the subject people kept circling back to, which tracks with what we see every day: small coding and documentation gaps quietly cost practices real revenue. For teams that want to tighten this up, it’s worth revisiting the fundamentals in our ophthalmology coding webinar on billing, retina injections, and compliant use of modifier 25, and looking at how a disciplined revenue cycle management approach closes those gaps before they reach a payer.
Two practices told us plainly that MIPS was their single biggest issue right now — and they are not alone. EHR and MIPS reporting remain a heavy lift, the requirements keep moving, and the stakes are tied directly to reimbursement. This is precisely the kind of work that doesn’t need to live on an already-stretched team. The right combination of revenue cycle and managed software support can carry the reporting burden and protect the dollars attached to it.
Clinical workflows were on the program too, and while they weren’t our focus at the booth, they sit right next to everything we do in software and technology. As practices push to streamline documentation and move patient data cleanly between systems, clinical informatics is where operational efficiency and clinical quality meet — and it’s an area worth watching for any practice trying to do more with the staff and systems it already has.
The through-line under all of it was technology, not as one more tool to buy, but as systems that connect, share data, and actually get supported when something breaks. That’s the difference between technology that lightens the load and technology that becomes one more thing to manage.
AAO 2026 is over, but the problems leaders carried to New Orleans didn’t stay there. Whether it’s coding pressure, MIPS, vendor sprawl, or simply staying lean while demand grows, these are solvable — with one partner across billing, software, technology, and operations. If any of this is on your list heading into 2027, let’s talk: schedule a complimentary Practice Performance Consultation, and we’ll help you turn this year’s takeaways into a plan for your practice.