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Eye Express
City, State: Winter Haven, Fla.
Key executives: Gregory Parrish, OD, (co-owner) Stephen Phillips, OD, FAAO, (co-owner and founder) and co-owners Brad Salomon, OD, and James Phillips, OD.
Number of Locations: 5, sixth in development
Year Founded: 1977

WINTER HAVEN, Fla.-- This busy practice with five locations eliminated some of its paperwork just a few years ago. Gregory Parrish, OD, said he had worked at Eye Express for about 14 years before the office computerized with CC Systems in 2003 to assist with their point of sale. Since then, OfficeMate bought out CC Systems’ point of sale product (COS) and Eye Express has upgraded to the new Marchon OfficeMate system for point of sale and practice management.

Gregory Parrish, OD

Some of the benefits of going paperless, said Parrish, are that price changes or insurance adjustments can be made immediately throughout all of their five locations, which are based in central Florida. He also says that the system shows what insurance doesn’t cover and what the patient pays. “It’s quicker and easier than on paper,” said Parrish. He added that computerizing paper records has reduced the room for errors related to pricing, benefits and payments. Eye Express plans to utilize OfficeMate’s electronic billing at the beginning of next year, he said.

In addition, OfficeMate has allowed the doctors to buy products more efficiently. “OfficeMate has been very valuable as far as allowing us to track sales better, to know what we are selling and to know how to buy appropriately compared to what we are selling,” said Parrish. He also emphasized the importance of the system’s ability to generate reports for inventory control. For example, he said, “We can run a report on how many frames we’ve sold.”

Eye Express utilizes other software for lab orders. When a purchase is made, the lab automatically gets a ticket to start working on the glasses, with a separate system called Innovations Lab Processing, which is important since Eye Express offers one-hour service.

OfficeMate is a point of purchase tool used at Eye Express.

Looking forward to the future, Parrish is excited about computerizing their medical practice side with a technology like OfficeMate’s ExamWriter. “We’ll be working toward that in the next couple of years,” he said. This will allow the doctors at Eye Express to keep a permanent electronic patient record that can include electronic photos of the eye as well as their clinical findings. The system also has treatment fields built in for diseases like glaucoma.

--Christine Brophy