Where are they now? An update on 2025 New Horizons Forum presenter EyeSentry

At the 2025 New Horizons Forum, the CEO of EyeSentry, Rachel Chapman, introduced herself as “a third-year medical student at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine and an aspiring glaucoma specialist” to thunderous applause. EyeSentry was presented during the “Maverick Innovators of Glaucoma Devices” discussion, and Rachel spoke passionately about the importance of early glaucoma risk assessment and public health initiatives to encourage screening eye exams.

Rachel was fortunate to grow up with a powerful role model at home – her mother, Dr. Karen Chapman, a fellowship-trained oculoplastic and orbital surgeon who has managed her own successful practice for 30 years. Between her first and second year of medical school as a research intern working with Dr. Arthur Sit at the Mayo Clinic, Rachel came to understand that the time of glaucoma diagnosis made a dramatic difference in the medical and surgical options available to manage patients’ glaucoma. Those who presented with moderate to advanced disease required far more aggressive treatment plans, often including several drops and filtering surgeries, while those with mild disease were offered laser procedures and minimally invasive surgeries. She also noted that patients with a higher degree of medical literacy tended to be diagnosed earlier, and therefore lost less of their visual field compared to those with less medical literacy. 

So, back in 2023, Rachel and her co-founder, Hannah Brown, banded together as second-year medical students to pursue a common goal – to build a tool that could assess glaucoma risk in the primary care physician’s office and concurrently launch a public health initiative to educate more people about the disease and promote early screening. And so EyeSentry was born!

Rachel and Hannah envision their product as a software system that will link to a handheld non-mydriatic fundus camera (which can take pictures of the back of your eye without dilating your pupil) and tonometer (to measure your intraocular pressure) in a primary care office. The software will also link to the doctor’s electronic medical records to collect other pertinent information, including the patient’s demographics and family history. This information will be analyzed to determine a patient’s risk of developing glaucoma. Based on those results, the patient could be referred to an eye doctor for further screening or receive materials outlining best practices and the appropriate frequency of screening eye exams for their age.

At the same time, this collected information will also be de-identified and analyzed as part of an initiative to recommend a glaucoma screening protocol to the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). Rachel and Hannah believe that collecting real-world data with EyeSentry may help provide the evidence needed to convince the USPSTF to recommend glaucoma screenings in primary care settings.

Rachel sees the journey of EyeSentry as part of her own, much longer journey. Now in their fourth year of medical school, Rachel and Hannah took a small step back from the company to apply and interview for residency. Hannah has matched at Virginia Tech for plastic & reconstructive surgery, and Rachel was thrilled to inform me that she matched in ophthalmology at the University of Virginia, where her mother was also an ophthalmology resident. While they were focused on the next steps in their academic careers, Rachel and Hannah brought on a software engineer to help build the EyeSentry secure web interface. With that in place, and their residencies secured, Rachel and Hannah are putting together an Advisory Board for EyeSentry and preparing an NIH SBIR grant submission.

Article by Cynthia Steel, PhD, MBA, Chief Scientific Officer for Glaucoma Research Foundation.