This quarterly electronic publication will keep you up-to-date on events at OfficeMate and within the eyecare industry. OSS News is our primary forum for communicating with our clients. There have been many changes at OfficeMate over the past few years and many more exciting new changes to come. Stay tuned for future editions of OSS News!

Over the last year, OfficeMate has made continuing, significant investments to expand OfficeMate Software Solutions University (OSSU). We understand the critical importance of education to the success of OfficeMate and ExamWRITER implementations in your business. I encourage you to visit our OSSU Web page at http://www.officemate.net/training.aspx to learn more about the wealth of educational opportunities for you and your staff including Internet-based group and private training, prerecorded iTrains, onsite training in your office, educational conferences, and webinars.

Complementing our wealth of educational opportunities, OfficeMate is conducting our 2nd Annual User Group Meeting at the Hyatt Regency in Newport Beach, California, from June 11 to 14 (http://www.officemate.net/usersgroup.aspx). Last year’s event was oversold and we expect nearly 250 OfficeMate clients to attend this year. Mark your calendar and make plans today to attend! Don’t miss the early registration discount if you register before May 1! You’ll receive over 12 hours of training by an OSSU faculty including industry-leading experts Dr. Scot Morris, Dr. Ian Lane, Rebecca Johnson, Valerie Manso, Phernell Walker, and many others.  In addition to the education, the personal and business relationships you’ll build with other OfficeMate and ExamWRITER clients is worth the trip alone.

As concerns about our economy grow, many OfficeMate clients are focusing on a more robust implementation of OfficeMate and ExamWRITER leveraging the patient recall, marketing, and communication modules to generate additional practice revenue. The OfficeMate User Group Meeting will address these and many more features of OfficeMate and ExamWRITER.

I look forward to seeing you in Newport Beach! Enjoy the warm, spring months. As always, if you have comments about any aspect of OfficeMate Software Solutions, please e-mail me at ed@officemate.net.

C. Edward Buffington
President & COO

Staff management is a major challenge in the ophthalmic industry. The goal of this column is to provide you with practical advice to assist in hiring, training, and retaining staff. This article is part five of an eight-part series. Visit our newsletter archive to read the previous article at http://www.officemate.net/newsletters_Winter2008.aspx#Staffing.

Step 5: Training for Success

In the words of Jack Runninger, OD, “The good news is that although you can’t select your children, you can select your employees. The bad news is that you may not always do as good a job of it as you should.” When hiring employees, most employers tend to look for someone who already has the skills they are looking for, and then train them in how they want them to respond to customers. It should be just the opposite: “Hire for attitude, train for skill” should be your rule in hiring, rather than vice versa.* When “hiring for attitude, training for skill,”, use the acronym ATTITUDE to help you determine the individual who will excel in your office as a new trainee. Look for the following qualities in the individual:

• Appreciative
• Thoughtful
• Teachable
• Insightful
• Trustworthy
• Understanding
• Dependable
• Eager

Training for skill, or “training for success” as I like to call it, begins with a documented training plan that includes details of the training process: step-by-step instruction along with completion timelines and early progress evaluations. This training program should be attached to an opportunity for advancement and tied to a structured compensation plan.

In addition to having the right plan, you must have the right person responsible for the training. While the person with the most experience seems to be the natural choice to train the new employee, there are a few considerations to think about. First, can this person provide the appropriate amount of time and attention that needs to be given to the new learner? Many times the person with the most experience is also the person with the most responsibility. Is there someone in the office with less responsibility who can train on a basic level, then hand the trainee over to the higher level trainer? Secondly, remember “Mini-Me” from the Austin Powers movies? When determining the right trainer, you must consider the attitude of the trainer. In essence, you will be creating Mini-Mes of the person responsible for orientating new staff into you practice. It would be a mistake to turn over your appreciative, thoughtful, teachable, insightful, trustworthy, understanding, dependable and eager new employee to a person who does not exhibit these same traits. So goes the leader…so goes the group.

* Runninger, Jack, OD, DOS, FAAO. You’ll Do Great If You Communicate! Published by Southern College of Optometry.

In the next edition of OSSNews: Step 6: Encouraging Growth.

Rebecca L. Johnson, COT, CPOT, COE
Director of Education

In the winter edition of OSSNews, we asked you to complete a survey telling us how we’ve done in the past and what you’d like to see from us in the future. OfficeMate’s success is predicated on providing you with products, services, and tools to successfully manage your eyecare business. Your report card is helping guide and direct future decisions we make.

697 OfficeMate & ExamWRITER users completed the survey. Congratulations go to Dorothy Bell for winning the Apple iPod in our giveaway! Other results from the survey are listed below:

• 98.4% of the respondents use OfficeMate.
• 46.9% of the respondents use ExamWRITER.
• The most commonly used feature in OfficeMate is fee slips.
• 82.8% of the respondents gave OfficeMate a grade of “A” or “B.”
• The most commonly used feature in ExamWRITER is the Patient Information Center.
• 72.5% of the respondents gave ExamWRITER a grade of “A” or “B.”
• The most commonly used Technology Integrated Practice (TIP) product is VisionWeb.
• The most commonly used training tool that respondents use is our iTrain online videos.
• 82.9% of the respondents gave the OfficeMate Software Solutions University trainers a grade of “A” or “B.”
• 75.4% of the respondents gave the OfficeMate Client Services team a grade of “A” or “B.”
• 64.1% of the respondents gave the OfficeMate, ExamWRITER, and other company documentation a grade of “A” or “B.”
• 77.5% of the respondents gave the OfficeMate Sales team a grade of “A” or “B.”

After the survey was closed, the executive team at OfficeMate Software Solutions met to review the results and create action items for each team. We take your comments very seriously and are always working hard to better serve your practice needs. Each team is addressing the needs and concerns you identified in the survey. The Development team is adding enhancement requests to our software tracking system. The Sales team is contacting clients who had questions about our products. The Documentation team is creating a list of “top 10 questions and answers” generated from survey responses. The Client Services team is working to solve client issues. And the Training team is contacting clients who requested training classes and working to educate them on how to use OfficeMate and ExamWRITER.

We appreciate your honest and candid feedback and are pleased to see the high marks that you gave to us. We will continue to work hard in 2008 to exceed your practice management and EMR needs!
We will conduct another report card survey at the end of this year. In the meantime, you are welcome to send us feedback at feedback@officemate.net.

Carrie Damschroder
Director of Documentation

We are happy to announce the expansion of our client services support team. In addition to our support teams in California, Illinois, and Ohio, we added a new support team in Covington, Louisiana, located near New Orleans. We are continuing our search for qualified industry experts who can understand and relate to your needs and the challenges you face while serving your patients.

In addition to our new team members, we are continuing to enhance to our Web-based training and support tools:

• OSSU Online Courses—We are offering more OSSU courses more frequently than we have in the past. These courses provide a great opportunity for new and seasoned staff members to ask live trainers specific questions. Our courses continue to expand in scope and available times to meet your needs.

• iTrain Prerecorded Videos—We continue to add new videos and update existing videos each month. We also added a new chapter feature to our videos that allows you to easily skip to a specific topic in the video. The prerecorded iTrains offer the convenience of 24/7 viewing with no limit to the number of times you view them.

• OSSU Private Online Courses—can be scheduled at a time that is mutually convenient for your office and our trainers to address your specific training needs. These private courses allow you to train all of your office staff at one time. These courses are available only to OfficeMate clients who have completed the OSSU group online courses.

These tools and more can be found on our Web site, www.officemate.net.

We are working diligently to provide you with the best customer service in the industry. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact me directly at 800.269.3666, ext. 1058, or e-mail: jims@officemate.net.

Jim Sotiropoulos
Vice President of Client Services

OfficeMate Software Solutions is pleased to introduce our newest Technology Integrated Practice partner, CyberImaging, Inc. With the addition of CyberEYES by CyberImaging, OfficeMate now offers its clients the full range of digital dispensing options from in-office frame-on-face demonstrations to precise measurements to e-commerce Virtual Try On capability through the doctor’s branded Web site. Below are just a few of the benefits of CyberEYES:

• Ensures complete accuracy and reduces remakes through digital measurements by automatically calculating pupillary distance, segment heights, wrap, and tilt
• Enables your patients to see exactly what they look like in premium products, including AR coating, photochromics, polarized lenses, and high-index lenses
• Increases dispensary revenue and profit margins by increasing the number of patients purchasing premium lenses and multiple pairs
• Allows your patients to see what they look like in any frame style in the database without buying additional frame inventory through the optional Virtual Frame feature

OfficeMate Software Solutions has partnered with CyberImaging, the market leader in precise measurement and imaging technology, to bring you CyberEYES, the most flexible digital dispensing solution on the market. Choose the components that fit your office or get the complete solution. Best of all, CyberEYES is adaptable to any size office and integrates with OfficeMate practice management software to save you the hassle of entering data twice.

To see a brief demonstration of CyberEYES, go to http://www.cyber-imaging.com/products.htm.
For more information about CyberEYES, contact me at OfficeMate Software Solutions today at 800.269.3666, ext. 5036, or jlee@officemate.net.

John Lee
Vice President of Technology Integrated Practice

OfficeMate On The Go is an exciting new product offered through our partner, Proximiti Communications. OfficeMate On The Go enables you to securely access key data in your OfficeMate software anywhere using your smartphone, Web-enabled PDA, laptop, or computer.

You can see your schedule, schedule or reschedule patients, view medical history information, medical and vision prescriptions, etc. It works great on any smartphone including the iPhone, Treo, Blackberry, and others. You can also access your practice information through your home computer.

OfficeMate On The Go enables you to securely access your practice’s vital information, including:

• Appointments
• Exam medical history
• Medical prescriptions
• Vision prescriptions
• Summary financials
• Notes and alerts
• Patient demographics

To see a five-minute video that demonstrates how OfficeMate On The Go works, go to http://www.proximiti.com/OMenroll.

For less than a dollar a day, you can enjoy instant, mobile access to your key practice data anywhere and anytime.

If you have any questions about this exciting new product, contact me at 800.269.3666, ext. 5036, or jlee@officemate.net.

John Lee
Vice President of Technology Integrated Practice

The Documentation Team at OfficeMate Software Solutions is pleased to announce that its “Installing & Activating the OfficeMate Suite” document won a prestigious Award of Excellence in the 2007–2008 Society for Technical Communication (STC) Southern California Technical Communication Competition. This regional competition included entries from eight Southern California STC chapters.

Carrie Damschroder, Director of Documentation, wrote and edited the installation and activation instructions for version 7.4 of the OfficeMate Suite and entered it into the Technical Publications/Software Guides portion of the competition.
The document received many glowing praises from the judges. One judge even noted that “I have never installed this product, but feel that I could easily do so using this guide.”

The Southern California STC chapters sponsored the technical publications competition to determine, recognize, and encourage excellence in communication through printed and online media. This competition honors technical writers and editors who set the standards for published technical communication.

We are honored to have won this award and are proud that OfficeMate Software Solutions is committed to educating all OfficeMate, ExamWRITER, and TIP users through handbooks, F1 online help, online videos, and live training courses.