Key takeaways:

• The partnership brings clinician-reviewed dry eye disease education and AI-guided symptom support to Verily Me.
• Multiple safety checks are built into every interaction.

NEW ORLEANS — Verily Health has partnered with Bausch + Lomb to expand Verily Me, its consumer health app, into eye health for the first time.

The launch adds risk and symptom education, an AI-guided symptom conversation with AI agent “Vi,” and an overview of treatment options for dry eye disease. An estimated 150 million U.S. adults experience occasional or frequent dry eye symptoms, and about 38 million live with diagnosed dry eye disease.

In this video, Joan-Marie Stiglich, ELS, sits down with Yolande Barnard and Vindell Washington, MD, MS, to discuss a partnership between Bausch + Lomb and Verily Health focusing on dry eye disease.

“This is a disease that affects tens of millions of people, and there's a disconnect sometimes between what people are diagnosed with and how they're being treated,” Vindell Washington, MD, MS, chief physician executive at Verily Health, told Healio at the Eyecelerator@AAO. “Our ability to use our tools to raise the knowledge in the community, to help point people to the right resources and to essentially lessen or eliminate the burden of disease is just the kind of problem that Verily likes to tackle.”

Joan-Marie Stiglich, ELS, chief AI officer at Healio, sat down with Washington and Yolande Barnard, senior vice president and general manager of North American pharmaceuticals at Bausch + Lomb, at the meeting to discuss the origins of the partnership, as well as the patient-focused features users can expect from the Verily Me app. The guided conversation with Vi asks targeted follow-up questions and considers a user’s available health history before offering self-care tips or a recommendation to see a professional. The goal, Washington said, is to help patients arrive at appointments better informed and have more productive conversations with their own eye care providers. The experience runs on Verily Pre, Verily’s flagship governed health intelligence platform, which enables healthcare organizations to responsibly govern, model and securely activate their protected health data at scale, he said.

Washington and Barnard emphasized that patient safety and data security were priorities in developing the dry eye disease education.

“Verily uses specific eye care providers to look at the content, make sure that it is clinically sound and that it uses credible sources, so we know that whatever data they provide is indeed in the best interest of the patient,” Barnard said. “Whatever data that gets collected from patients in the back end is 100% secure. That really is a high bar to clear, and we feel confident that Verily has the mechanisms in place to ensure that.”

In contrast with other AI-based platforms such as ChatGPT, which provide broad information about a condition, Verily Me gathers context about a user’s symptoms and history first, and grounds its guidance in clinically reviewed content.

“I don't really want to know what the risk is of my dry eye disease compared to everyone who might be walking planet Earth. I want to know about it relative to me: My conditions, the medications that I am taking, etc. What is the precise recommendation for me?” Barnard told Healio. “We are not saying that people shouldn’t seek information in a lot of different ways, but when you come to our partnership for information, we believe that we have to have this high level of trust within the community that the information we are delivering is the right information for you as an individual patient.”

Editor's note: This article was updated on Oct. 16, 2026, to more accurately reflect the health app's new features.

For more information:

Yolande Barnard is senior vice president and general manager of North American pharmaceuticals at Bausch + Lomb.

Joan-Marie Stiglich, ELS, chief AI officer at Healio, can be reached at jmstiglich@healio.com.

Vindell Washington, MD, MS, is chief physician executive at Verily Health.