Bausch + Lomb Unveils Orphia, an AI-Powered Digital Health Platform to Free Up Physician Time
Bausch + Lomb has launched a new AI-powered digital health platform, Orphia™, designed to strip administrative load away from eye care providers and hand more of it to conversational AI agents starting with cataract patient education.
The platform will sit under a newly created arm of the company called Digital Health Services, and importantly for practitioners weighing up whether to engage with it, it has been built as brand agnostic, designed to serve all eye care providers, regardless of the products, devices or treatments they choose to use.
Cataract education first cab off the rank
The first application of the platform is focused on pre-surgery cataract education, helping patients understand their condition and treatment options, identify concerns and prepare before they meet their surgeon. Rather than simply functioning as a patient FAQ tool, the aim is to ensure patients arrive informed and ready, so conversations with their surgeon are more meaningful, allowing physicians to focus on what matters most: achieving the best possible outcome for each patient's vision.
To build out the conversational side of the platform, Bausch + Lomb has engaged Hippocratic AI, a company specialising in voice AI agents for healthcare, running on a proprietary large language model built on more than 200 million real patient interactions and validated by more than 7,500 US-licensed clinicians. Hippocratic AI's technology has already been deployed across major health systems in the US.
Freeing up clinical time, not replacing it
Bausch + Lomb chairman and CEO Brent Saunders framed Orphia as an answer to a question the industry hasn't fully solved despite years of product innovation: how to help physicians spend less time on everything around care and more time delivering it. He said Orphia was created to serve every eye care provider, no matter what they prescribe or what product they use.
Cataract and refractive surgeon Vance Thompson, founder of Vance Thompson Vision, backed the approach, noting that practices have long poured significant staff time into pre-op patient education because informed patients are more confident, more engaged and better prepared to make decisions about their vision. He said the technology's value lies in freeing staff to focus on empathy, trust and personal connection, while AI handles routine operational tasks like pre-op calls, with people remaining at the heart of care.
Hippocratic AI CEO and co-founder Munjal Shah described the ambition in similarly sweeping terms, saying the goal was to embed AI agents into daily workflows with a system that understands ophthalmology's unique care models, returning valuable hours to physicians and their patients what he called "abundance in health care."
Built to plug into existing workflows
For practice managers wary of yet another disconnected system, Bausch + Lomb says Orphia is designed to integrate with the systems practices already use, complementing existing workflows and generating actionable insights for clinical teams. The company has flagged this as only the beginning: over time it plans to expand the platform's capabilities to support the full patient journey, from care coordination to practice workflow, reducing the operational burden that stands between physicians and their patients.
The platform will be led by Manisha Narasimhan, who has spent the past three years helping shape the company's strategy, AI and digital capabilities, positioning Bausch + Lomb to expand beyond traditional products into software-enabled eye care solutions, and brings nearly two decades of experience across biotechnology, strategy, corporate development and digital transformation.
What it means for the profession
For eye care professionals, the launch signals a bigger play by Bausch + Lomb into software and AI-enabled services, beyond its traditional lens, device and pharmaceutical lines. Whether practices embrace an AI voice agent handling pre-op conversations will likely hinge on how well it integrates with existing practice management systems, and whether patients respond positively to an AI-led education step ahead of their surgical consult. No details on pricing, availability timeline, or a broader ophthalmology feature roadmap were disclosed in the announcement.
