An eye out for vision loss: New Philly mobile van brings free eye disease screening directly to patients

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know! A large white van pulled up alongside the curb at a busy intersection in West Philadelphia on a recent Monday night. A 10-foot-tall image of an eye, with blues, greens and yellows coloring the iris, decorated the side of the vehicle. Inside Penn Medicine’s Scheie Eye Institute in MOTION van, mobile unit manager Andrea McCord removed cloth covers from several high-tech-looking machines, each of which are used by Penn student technicians and clinicians to examine patients’ eyes. These machines are more sophisticated than what people might see at a routine eye exam for glasses. “We take intraocular pressure of the eye, and then they come over here to these two cameras, where they get some more advanced imaging, such as corneal topography, pachymetry,” McCord explained. The testing and imaging can detect serious eye diseases like glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, macular degener