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Introduction
LASIK is a favoured surgical treatment for the treatment of myopia and myopic astigmatism. 1 Although the safety, predictability and efficacy of LASIK has been well established, studies reporting outcomes of a large sample size (>10 000 eyes) from multiple surgeons are limited in the peer-reviewed literature with just two studies until now 2 3 (although one 2 of these was in a paid supplement). The lack of adequate, accessible data collection and storage systems that allow reliable statistical analysis, cost and logistics all represent barriers to reporting outcomes of large populations.
A corporate environment provides a structure on which to standardise and optimise processes and protocols, and manage quality control and assurance. LASIK Vision Corporation was one of the early rapidly expanding corporate LASIK entities started in Vancouver, Canada, in 1998. An active surveillance system was instituted to monitor outcomes and enable standards to be assessed across multiple clinics and surgeons. Standardised surgical protocols were developed and the majority of surgeons underwent a training scheme to implement these protocols. Due to excessive spending and expansion, LASIK Vision Corporation eventually became insolvent and filed for bankruptcy in April 2001. 4
Although this study reports outcomes from approximately 10 years ago (ie, before the advent of flying spot excimer lasers, aspheric and custom ablation profiles, and femtosecond lasers for flap creation), the results are still relevant to current practice since the 217 excimer lasers (now Technolas Perfect Vision, St Louis, Missouri, USA) are still widely used for LASIK worldwide, including corporate LASIK providers in the UK (27 clinics, Ultralase, Leeds, UK), Canada (28 clinics, LASIK MD, Montreal, Quebec), and Spain and Europe (60 clinics, Clinica Baviera, Valencia, Spain). While there have been a number of improvements to the 217 excimer laser such as the inclusion of wavefront-guided ablations, the planoscan option remains essentially unchanged from that which was used for the present study.
This report provides an analysis of myopic treatments across all LASIK Vision clinics. This report acts as a historical evaluation of the results achieved in a corporate multicentre refractive surgery practice environment with multiple surgeons trained under the same protocol.
Methods
This was a retrospective case series of patients undergoing myopic LASIK including 38 surgeons operating at 11 surgical centres. The...