Moorfields Eye Hospital has developed a pilot iPad application to enable the running of virtual glaucoma clinics.
The app has been designed to save glaucoma patients numerous and often inconvenient trips to hospital and free up glaucoma specialists' time, a statement said.
The prototype informatics application remotely collects information on glaucoma patients to enable it to be viewed by specialists for diagnosis in another location. It was developed by Moorfields Eye Hospital's OpenEyes team, Charing Systems and Black Pear software.
The development was funded by a £75,000 award from NHS Connecting for Health's Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) Information Sharing Challenge Fund (ISCF).
The app allows patient data to be collected by clinical staff not necessarily trained to make management decisions, with the decision-making made in 'virtual clinics' by a consultant expert in the management of the condition.
Moorfields said the need for virtual clinics had been clear for many years, but the technology required to deliver them had previously been lacking.
Bill Aylward, consultant ophthalmologist and head of the OpenEyes team at Moorfields, said: 'The funding from the ITK ISCF has allowed us to develop and trial this pilot and work with external partners to extend the reach of OpenEyes to other clinical areas and enable us to move closer to the internationally accepted standard of openER, which in turn will improve the sharing and analysis of clinical data.
'Virtual clinics are a way of improving living with glaucoma by reducing the patient's need for regular travel to a central hospital and freeing up more of the consultant's specialist time to concentrate on treating the patient's condition.'