TFOS DEWS II - Workshop process & progress

Individual Subcommittee meetings were subsequently held around the world (Barcelona, New York, Paris, Las Vegas, London, and Washington, DC) between June and November 2015. Draft outlines of each Subcommittee report were developed and submitted after these meetings and reviewed by the TFOS DEWS II membership to identify overlap or gaps. Subcommittee Chairs met in London in early November 2015 to review progress to date and to refine and approve the draft outlines.
Between November 2015 and April 2016, Subcommittees developed draft reports and circulated them to the entire TFOS DEWS II membership for comment. All available members of TFOS DEWS II then met at a post-ARVO meeting in May 2016 in Seattle, WA, USA. Each Subcommittee Chair delivered a summary presentation of their Subcommittee's draft report. The TFOS DEWS II membership had opportunity to discuss, ask critical questions, and give comments and make suggestions. The Subcommittees were then charged to refine their draft reports based on written and oral comments and develop their final reports by October 2016. Updates of these reports were again presented in summary form at the TFOS 2016 Conference (September; Montpellier, France), prior to the full reports being circulated to the TFOS DEWS II membership for final comment. Member critiques were addressed in the final Subcommittee reports. Subcommittee reports were then turned over to the appointed Harmonization Committee (Table 3) for final editorial and content review in late 2016. The Harmonization Committee met in Sydney, Australia in early January 2017 to finalize the reports and prepare them for submission for publication.
A major difficulty in the process was dealing with the definition of DED. It became obvious during the almost 2-year process of literature review, discussion and writing of reports, that the definition of DED needed to be developed after all the reports had been written (and read) and not before, as it was critical that the definition was evidence-based. A group of 8 individuals met in early December 2016 in St. Paul, MN, USA to further refine the Definition & Classification Subcommittee's definition of DED in the context of the other completed reports.