Opinions on Software Officemate vs. Maxieyes vs. Compulink

[OPTNOVA]

Hey,
I just started work in an office which has 4 different optometrists and the two guys that are part time have asked me to do a little research for them about the different software programs out there for optometry. If you are familiar with a program please give you opinions of cost, ease of use, and practicality.

I know there are a lot of posts on the PDA software and obviously it would be ideal to have an office with wireless that can use all one program, but the practice I work for is still completely on paper.

I'm not only asking for my current job, but I am also curious for my own practice.

The three programs that I have found from doing a simple search are Maxieyes, Officemate, and Compulink.

I personally think that if the office had a good program which did everything for you it could actually replace an employee or even two in a 2-4 optometrist practice. Anyway I'm just curious as to the experience you all have with these.
Thanks

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[OPTNOVA]

Are none of you aware of the opinions of the software?

 

[eyestrain]

Jeez, have a little patience. You waited a whopping four hours for a reply. Its a Sunday, people don't live on this message board. Give it a few days and hopefully someone will help you. Have you contacted any of the companies yourself?

 

[AwesomeSauce]

I have played with all three, havent had experiance with any actually deployed.

my favorite is compulink, I like how you can design your own screens and how it can be differant for each user.

maxiumeyes is good too, but it seems kinda overwhelming compared to the other three.

Office mate is the cheapest, the demo I played with was very crashy, but it might not be the case in reality, its easier to use than maiximeyes.

 

[OPTNOVA]

Jeez, have a little patience. You waited a whopping four hours for a reply. Its a Sunday, people don't live on this message board. Give it a few days and hopefully someone will help you. Have you contacted any of the companies yourself?

LOL I guess I was a little bit impatient.

Anyway here is what I have found.
Officemate is around 3000 for a first year start up and requires a 1500 yearly update to use the software. These numbers might be wrong, but they are close anyway. I also found out that if you have a large practice that sells enough glasses with a partner company you can get the officemate program for free. The office I'm working in uses it, but Officemate does not have an update for Windows Vista and from what I read on their website they aren't going to have one anytime soon. They basically chastize people for upgrading, lol. The other problems that the users in my office have are that occassions the data is lost because the program crashes fairly frequently.

I was unable to find a website for Maxieyes.

Compulink has a very nice website with a demo that you can download. I have no clue as to the cost though.

Also the Officemate website states that they are the most abundant program used in optometry offices 35% with 32 competing products out there.

 

[posner]

We intitially started with Officemate...absolutely terrible in every way. Our offices Marchon sales out us in the top 1% of offices in the nation and we didnt get it for $3000. Maybe if you have a three workstation operation, but not for a large multi-doctor practice. Nevertheless, it is relatively inexpensive, but it is garbage. Customer service is awful and the big wai for the VSP interface was a gigantic let-down. We dumped it after 2 months and demanded our money back.

We were torn between Compulink and Maximeyes. Each company has its own draws. Maximeyes uses filemaker as the basis for the software. While it is fairly simple, we found it very useful. They are switching databases next year. Compulink is nice as well. Both companies areevolvong together, each always trying to outdo the other. While Officemate has a large marketshare, it is only because most ODs are so cheap and they equate the quality of software directly with the price.

No matter what software you choose, do not let any software salesman try to tell you your office will be instantly paperless. We are as paperless as we can be with every gadget you can get, and we are still a year away from being nearly paperless. ANy software you prchase will be a huge change, and will take quite some time to fully implement. For us, the deciding factor was the training offered by Maximeyes(first-insight corporation). They sent two trainers(one for each office) down from the North west for a week to fully implement the software correctly. They return about 8 weeks later for 3-4 days for follow up training. Good luck getting your staff trained with the bogus online university trained offered by Officemate! Dont be a cheapskate!

Posner

 

[KHE]

We intitially started with Officemate...absolutely terrible in every way. Our offices Marchon sales out us in the top 1% of offices in the nation and we didnt get it for $3000. Maybe if you have a three workstation operation, but not for a large multi-doctor practice. Nevertheless, it is relatively inexpensive, but it is garbage. Customer service is awful and the big wai for the VSP interface was a gigantic let-down. We dumped it after 2 months and demanded our money back.

We were torn between Compulink and Maximeyes. Each company has its own draws. Maximeyes uses filemaker as the basis for the software. While it is fairly simple, we found it very useful. They are switching databases next year. Compulink is nice as well. Both companies areevolvong together, each always trying to outdo the other. While Officemate has a large marketshare, it is only because most ODs are so cheap and they equate the quality of software directly with the price.

No matter what software you choose, do not let any software salesman try to tell you your office will be instantly paperless. We are as paperless as we can be with every gadget you can get, and we are still a year away from being nearly paperless. ANy software you prchase will be a huge change, and will take quite some time to fully implement. For us, the deciding factor was the training offered by Maximeyes(first-insight corporation). They sent two trainers(one for each office) down from the North west for a week to fully implement the software correctly. They return about 8 weeks later for 3-4 days for follow up training. Good luck getting your staff trained with the bogus online university trained offered by Officemate! Dont be a cheapskate!

Posner

For the record, my experience was the exact opposite. I worked for an office that went with Maximeyes and it was a disaster. None of the things they said it would do actually worked and the tech support was abysmal at best.

We wanted features such as....

1) If we do an HRT, we wanted that to automatically go into the patients charge sheet. It did not. We had to enter all charges separately.

2) We wanted it to link up to our equipment. FOr example, we wanted our autorefractor and NCT data to be downloaded directly into Maximeyes. It would not do this. We had to pay an outside computer guy thousands of dollars to get Maximeyes to recognize data outputs from the various automated instruments we had and even then, only about half of the worked.

3) Because Maximeyes is based in FilemakerPro, you essentially have a template running on top of Filemaker which in turns run on top of WINDOWS. 😱 The potential for disasterous crashes is huge, and we encountered more than a couple.

4) The way that that Maximeyes generates practice demographic and performance reports is a time consuming mess and even then, the data spit out is suspect at best.

Officemate definately has less bells and whistles but the office I bought uses it and I have found it to be far more stable and the report data to be far more accurate and reliable.

Of course...each person's needs vary greatly so as always...try them out before you buy.

 

[posner]

We did have some trouble integrating our OCTs and Visual fields. These problems have been solved to our satisfaction. I have heard of other offices having trouble, but so far we have been lucky. As I mentioned, they are switching from Filemaker in the coming months which should be a huge leap forward. The little Dwarf that is CEO of Officemate could not be a bigger liar. He told me to my face the VSP interface was done and ready to go 2 years ago. We bought the Software and waited for nearly a year before they launched the interface. It was the biggest letdown we could have imagined. If you do any significant VSP volume(we are 30% -/+) it is useless unless your like inefficiency The only offices that dont mind it dont know any better.

There are many software options available, so shop around. Each software company has its pluses and minuses. Before we made our final decision to dump Officemate we spoke with several offices that had each software system and we went to a few offices to see the software in action. Be sure to talk to the office staff and not just the doctors. I found many doctors loved the paperless integration but were clueless about most of the other features that made up the nuts and bolts of the program.

Just because we had a bad experience with Officemate doesnt mean there are not other offices that love the software. It is what you get used to. Each company produces a product that will make your office more efficient if you are still doing it the old fashioned way. I still believe the biggest draw of Officemate is the motel 6 discount price that ODs just love.

Posner

 

[posner]

By the way, my biggest complaint with Maximeyes so far has been trying to get reports generated that are easy to interpret and make use of. This is still a work in progress and I am on the phone a few times a weeks trying to sort this out.

POsner

 

[rpames]

I have Compulink, or as I call it, Compusucks! I really hate it. It has some nice features, but they love to sell add ons. We did not buy the Crystal reports package so some of the financial reports can not be run. We have 9 computers on Compulink. We do not have the EMR package but we are planning to add an EMR in the next few months when we open our second office. I contacted Compulink about adding EMRs to our current office and then add 4 more terminals for our new office. They gave me a quote of $21,000! We already paid them about $25,000 when we put it in our current office. They have horrible customer service too.

I am looking at Eyecoderight. It seems like a very good program.

 

[OPTNOVA]

Thanks for the info.

It looks like it will all change before I need to worry about it.

Apparently the costs really depend on how many computers you use and the size and options your office needs.

I'm actually thinking about telling my bosses to just hire a computer tech guy to write a program for them. It might actually be cheaper and you would always know who to get to fix it for you.

 

[fjpod]

Look into the Visual Management System by MS Group Software. They have a web site and will send you a demo. It may not be the fanciest thing on the market, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to use it. It even has EMR if you want it. I find that too many of the systems offered today have too many "choices" for staff to make for simple, routine procedures like scheduling and billing.

It's still DOS based right now, (they are working on a Windows version) but it is a stable, robust, networkable (I have 18 stations). It will run on any standard PC with Windows alongside your web-browser, etc.

I've been running it over 20 years with no loss of data.

 

[oregoncoasteyes]

The website for Maximeyes is www.first-insight.com. We use Maximeyes at the optometry office I work at and it works well. My doc is a little too much from the old school to switch to paperless but I have seen a number of other doctors offices go entirely paperless using this program. While there are a lot of good things and the program is easy to customize using their online support there are some issues:

1. You can only edit the pt.s record at one station at one time. This should not be an issue in most offices but it does make it complicated when you are trying to edit something in the exam record while the optical is trying to access the file as well.

2. There is not a great deal of note space and you have to really get in the routine of always writing the same type of notes in the same area or you could end up searching for information for a long time.

3. The online tech support is great but if you have a big enough problem that requires calling them you will waste the whole day on the phone--they take a long time to problem solve and a number of updates cannot be done with the system pulled up leaving someone behind trying to get the computers going when everyone else has left for the day.

On the good side:

1. You can play with the software and get it to do whatever you need it to do.

2. You can have the entire optical and office on the same system with all frame and prices integrated effectively.

3. You can intergrate auto refractor, auto phoropters and optomap into the system.

 

[soccerfan]

I also have compulink and have issues with it. For one they just don't get customer service. Recently I was quoted a price for adding another terminal and then after sending the check in was told "oh we are sorry but it is really $500". I had them send my check back to me and told them to forget it I will get by without it for now.
They promised their new 9.0 for about 2 years before they actually delivered it and then if you use EMR it will not pull up your prior files. So what good is it!!

I agree with the previous post, they love to add things on. Forget to tell you what you will need when you do add something so it always seems like pulling teeth to get everything you need to complete something.

I would switch, probably to Crowell if I didn't have so much invested (I have used compulink for 13 years and have 14 workstations). But I am at the point where I still might make the switch.

 

[madu11]

I have started looking into going paperless and was wondering if there were any new opinions on the software now that quite a few months have passed since the last post.

 

[zyg0te]

On a related note, does anyone know how "office production" is computed with Compulink?