71577Distant Ophthalmic Triage System (DOTS)ClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKEye care provision is an essential part of primary health care, which is reflected in the over 13 million national health service (NHS) sight tests performed in England every year. However, the optical sector has been halted by the Covid-19, and is likely to continue to be severely disrupted for a long time, since social distancing cannot be maintained during routine eye examination. This situation is having a severe economic impact on the sector, but moreover, the suspension of routine primary eye care poses a risk of a large number of eye conditions being left undetected and untreated, some of which may result in permanent visual loss. NHS England, together with the UK Optical bodies, have stated the need to provide urgent, emergency, or essential primary eye care. It has been advised that, where possible, this service should include remote triage and consultations by telephone or video; taking advantage of technology to minimise face-to-face appointments and patient -- practitioner contact time. It is thus imperative to devise new approaches to eye health care that can be implemented remotely. Optonet projects the development of a Distant Ophthalmic Triage (DOT) System to assist optometrists (ophthalmic opticians) during remote consultations with individuals who may experience ocular symptoms during the lockdown. The DOT system is an innovative software that can be accessed online and comprises a thorough set of visual triage questions related to common ocular symptoms. Once patient answers are recorded, the program will suggest a list of likely underlying causes for those symptoms. In addition, the DOT system will allow the practitioner to display high-quality visual charts remotely on any computer or tablet owned by the patient, in order to collect some essential visual data. This is a unique new initiative. Optonet's DOTS will also offer safe record keeping in the cloud, using a secure dedicated server. This sorts the problem of safe and organized record keeping (as optometrists may work from home), but it also simplifies access to data, and the exchange of clinical information with other health care professionals. Optonet's unique innovative approach may help restoring some degree of primary health eye care for the general public, whilst minimizing the risk of Covid-19 transmission. This initiative may also significantly help the optical sector to keep some degree of economic activity during social distancing conditions. It can also be the first step towards the development of a future Tele-Optometry service. The Royal College of Ophthalmologists and the British and Irish Orthoptic Society have recently warned on the risks of using charts that have not been properly validated, during remote consultations (in home settings); and recommend caution before adopting them for health assessments. The Extension for Impact funding will allow Optonet to carry out validation studies of the remote standardised DOTS’ vision charts against gold standard charts in clinical settings. Optonet aims at publishing one of the first ever studies to validate charts for ophthalmic remote consultations, in peer-reviewed journals. Gaining academic and scientific trust will definitely increase speed to market for our project and will help its dissemination, which will, in turn, impact in improved quality of remote ophthalmic consultations to the public. This extension will also allow beta testing of the system and to find prospective partners.