 |  Doctors |
| Doctors |
The new millennium provides true advances in reducing job turnaround time without the customary large capital investment. Remote tracing! There are now available new devices and software that allows your practice to instantly transmit lens orders as well as frame size and shape data to participating laboratories. They fall under two categories.
Mechanical
Laboratory equipment manufactures are marketing stripped down versions of their heavy duty lab frame tracing devices in an effort to make them cost effective for use only in a doctor's office. An example is Gerber Coburn's remote tracer named Envoy. Devices such as these are coupled with host specific POP software (software written by the laboratory's optical software authors for the purpose of point of purchase data entry).
While these systems seem to work under ideal conditions, they are still quite expensive, (about $7,200.00) and multiple installations are very hard for the laboratory to manage. They are also prone to frequent time consuming calibration, if this is neglected redo rates skyrocket. Another drawback is the software that drives them usually forces the user to specify lens selection using complicated laboratory specific coding. In most cases, these coding combinations makes little sense to office assistants and requires time consuming data entry that can in some cases cause the wrong lenses to be pulled and processed by the lab.
Digital Imaging
WinVoice Development, a company located in Tulsa Oklahoma, has developed software and hardware technology called e.lens. e.lens computes accurate frame size and shape from a doctor's tracing using an optical imager in place of a mechanical frame tracer. Doctors and labs report that the shape and size derived by e.lens is equal to that derived by expensive mechanical frame tracers.
e.lens rarely requires re-calibration and the software that drives it is intuitive and easy to use. The benefits of e.lens are numerous, but the most obvious is cost. Depending upon the participating laboratory's marketing policy, a typical e.lens installation in a doctor's office can be as affordable as $250.00 for the software and all related hardware. In some cases even less!.
An investment this low shines a whole new light on remote tracing! For instance, remote tracing is most desirable for lens only patients, (customers that don't intend to purchase a new frame with their updated prescription). These patients typically own just one pair of eyeglasses and do not wish to send them to the laboratory for updated lenses to be processed. Lens only patients are very susceptible to the marketing campaigns of one hour stores.
Depending upon the size of the practice, lens only patients amount to 5 or 6 a week, multiplied by 52 weeks brings the total annual lens only clientele to 260. Use this figure to divide by the cost of e.lens ($250.00), computing the cost of e.lens jobs at just 96 cents each. This means the e.lens system is paid for in less than one year utilizing just lens only patients.
No other system even comes close to this cost per job! In fact, if you use the typical cost for just a quality mechanical frame tracer ($7,200.00) and the same 5 lens only jobs per week, it would take in excess of thirty years of lens only jobs to pay out, NOT factoring in interest, inflation or equipment repairs!
Making e.lens even more attractive is the fact that several e.lens laboratories are waiving the cost of e.lens to clients that guaranty them a certain monthly dollar volume.
For an e.lens order demo click on: e.lens demo wizard
To locate a licensed e.lens laboratory near you click on: WinVoice Development -- e.lens Electronic Lens Processing
See Also: Flyer from e.lens remote tracing software/hardware
