An optometry practice runs two businesses out of one building. There is a clinic full of diagnostic equipment in the back and a retail optical shop at the front, and they want different things from the technology.
Pretest and exam lanes are full of instruments that produce data: autorefractors, visual field analyzers, fundus cameras, tomographers. Most of them want a network connection and somewhere to send images, and some of them are considerably older than the network they are being asked to join. Making those devices land in the record correctly is the bulk of the work in an optometry office.
Retinal photos and scans accumulate, and unlike a lot of data you specifically want the old ones, because the comparison across years is the finding. So storage and backup get planned around keeping images indefinitely rather than cycling them out when a drive fills up.
Frames, lenses, inventory, and the point of sale are a retail operation with retail needs, and they usually run on different software than the clinical record. Those two systems have to share one network without either becoming the other's problem, and the dispensary workstations need to be quick, because a patient is standing there deciding.
A patient moves from check-in to pretest to the lane to the optician in a single visit. Every one of those stops is a workstation, and if one of them is slow the entire visit backs up behind it. That is why we care about the worst machine in the building rather than the average one.
Patient records are patient records, so the same HIPAA questions apply here as anywhere else in healthcare, including on the machines out in the dispensary where the traffic is. Those are easy to forget precisely because they feel like retail terminals.
We are based in Katy and support optometry practices across greater Houston and southeast Texas, from Sugar Land and Richmond to League City, Baytown, and The Woodlands.