Administering the best care to your patients while reducing your operational costs is an important goal in building a successful optometric practice. As your practice grows, you may find that software and services your practice once relied on can be replaced with better solutions or consolidated with a single optometry software vendor.

Software vendor consolidation is the practice of analyzing the vendors who supply you with the software you use in your practice and identify ways to consolidate the solutions under one vendor’s product portfolio to reduce costs, improve service, and decrease risks to build a comprehensive system. Below are a few benefits of consolidating the software vendors in your optometric practice.

The Benefits of Consolidating Optometry Software Vendors

Lower Costs

While spreading your resource dollars among vendors may spark competitors to drive down costs, selecting as many optometry solutions as you can from a single vendor may give you more savings than you would have received from pitting competitors against each other.

As you add more features, functionality, and products from a single vendor's portfolio, they are often times more willing to add discounts to reduce your operational costs of using the products.

Decreased Admin Work

Managing invoices and maintaining software infrastructure and integrations is a full-time job. When consolidating optometry software vendors, you can lower your administration work to reduce the contracts you have to sign, invoices you have to manage, and IT requirements you have to troubleshoot.

In many cases, the optometry software vendor is either selling you a homegrown solution or a third-party tool embedded into their solution. When this happens, the vendor is responsible for ensuring that their product communicates and works correctly with the other solutions in the tool.

Less Risks

Managing multiple software accounts creates more security risks that could land you, your practice, and your patients in some hot water. As your optometric practice relies on more software solutions from different vendors, you increase the number of usernames and passwords required to access these accounts and the burden of changing them as employees come and go. When you’re required to set up and remember multiple usernames and passwords, you begin to create less secure passwords.

Many vendors with multiple solutions embedded into the software offer single-sign-on access to the different tools that you can access from the same portal to create a complete software solution. This allows you and your staff to create and remember more secure passwords that make it harder for unwanted guests to access sensitive information.

Better Service

Consolidating your software solutions under one vendor will help build a stronger business relationship, which can improve your level of support. Onboarding more of a vendor’s product portfolio in your practice could improve your service level as the vendor may view your practice as a strategic partnership.

Is it time to consolidate your optometry software vendors to select a comprehensive practice management and EHR solution with embedded patient recall, education, code verification, frame catalogs, and ePrescribing tools? Download this guide for key questions to ask your vendor.