New platform enables practices to educate, retain patients

Practices can use the system to tailor educational material to patients, issue reminders about upcoming appointments and seek new patients.

Eyemaginations recently introduced ECHO, a Web-based system that helps practices retain existing patients and market to potential patients via email and social networking sites.

“It’s a really green and cost-effective way for practices to market,” Smitha S. Gopal, vice president of product and strategy for Eyemaginations, said in an interview with Ocular Surgery News. “This is a simple, automated way of getting information out very efficiently.”

Practices can use ECHO to send 3-D animated videos and other content via email and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

“As patients receive the information and share it with their friends and family, it can serve as a really great marketing tool for the practice to go viral and encourage new patients in the community to reach out to a practice for their health needs,” Ms. Gopal said.

The service is free to customers using Eyemaginations’ LUMA educational software package and will be bundled with LUMA in the future. It is the successor to the company’s 3D-Eye Home computer platform.

“We are trying to transition people over to ECHO by letting them know about all these additional benefits. But we are still supporting the 3D-Eye Home platform,” Ms. Gopal said.

More than 4,000 eye care practices are signed up to use the 3D-Eye Home system, and several thousand more are signed up to use LUMA.

“It’s a target market for ECHO,” Ms. Gopal said.

The ECHO platform was introduced to ophthalmologists at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting in San Diego and to the optometric community at Vision Expo East in New York. It will be available this summer.

Expanding patient access

The ECHO platform advances Eyemaginations’ business model of providing user-friendly products for a growing customer base, Ms. Gopal said.

“We’re really excited about ECHO because it requires no special hardware, requires no training and can be implemented very simply in a number of different ways, depending on a practice’s workflow,” she said. “I think we’re really optimistic about the potential for new users.”

ECHO works on newer Android cellphones, Ms. Gopal said. Plans are in the works to make it compatible with the iPad, iPhone, Android Tablet and Blackberry.

“We feel like more and more people are getting content on those devices, and they’re not as reliant on their PCs as they used to be,” Ms. Gopal said. “So, it’s going to be really important for practices, we feel, to engage with their patients using these new media. And we want to help practices with easy-to-use, simple solutions that let them accomplish that.”

Products in development will be designed to take full advantage of rapidly advancing wireless technology, she said.

“There’s a lot that’s under consideration and a lot that we’ve got in development,” Ms. Gopal said. “The two things that we are the most excited about at the company are moving more and more of our content and solutions to the cloud because we think that is much easier to think about as far as accessing a website than it is to think about doing a download … and making sure everything is compatible with the software that you’re running.”

Seamless EMR interface

The ECHO platform can import patient lists from some electronic medical record systems or other databases and send hundreds of emails simultaneously to market a practice or contact established patients, Ms. Gopal said.

Despite uncertainties about the definition and scope of federal meaningful use regulations for EMRs, the ECHO platform and subsequent products will likely interface with EMRs in the interest of retaining and educating patients, Ms. Gopal said.

“I think both practices and solutions providers are still trying to figure out all of the details of the legislation and understand what truly constitutes meaningful use and what are some of the most effective and efficient ways of helping health care providers document everything with every patient,” she said. “We do envision a point at which you’re entering all the patient’s information into the EMR and then that’s automatically creating a message to send to the patient, whether that is a reminder about their next appointment or it’s reinforcing the information that you just provided to them during the visit. That’s absolutely the direction we’re going in.” – by Matt Hasson

• Smitha S. Gopal can be reached at Eyemaginations Inc., 600 Washington Ave., Suite 100, Baltimore, MD 21204; 410-321-5481; fax: 410-616-8657; email: smitha@eyemaginations.com.