So can you talk about the major factors that make ophthalmic medications particularly vulnerable to these shortages?

Yeah, sure.

So, um, I think it's high for... and, and that's the result of several factors.

Um, first, I'd like to say, uh, you know, the list of ophthalmic drugs that we used in this analysis was intentionally very broad.

So to come up with our list, we had a panel of ophthalmologists go through all the drugs on the shortage list and highlight any drugs that they thought an ophthalmologist might prescribe.

So as a result of this, about fifty percent of the drugs were more traditional, locally delivered medications like eye drops, and fifty percent were systemic medications that we might not frequently prescribe as ophthalmologists, but are essential in the even- in infections or in the management of uveitis, just to give two examples.

Actually, in the early stages of this analysis, I actually also included medications that our anesthesiologists use in ophthalmic surgery, uh, but eventually decided not to include those in the analysis.

So what sort of changes do you think we could make to get more transparency a- around those unknown causes and potentially prevent future shortages? And of course, some of them are unpredictable, like perhaps these events that you said sort of just expose a lot of the weakness in our systems that cause the shortages themselves.