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Peter J. Cass, OD

Beaumont Family Eye Care
Beaumont, Texas

Peter Cass, OD, keeps busy as the sole full-time optometrist at Beaumont Family Eye Care in southeastern Texas, where he sees up to 50 patients per day. In addition to seeing patients and managing the practice, Cass also is president of the Texas Optometric Association.

He credits his passion for technology as the critical element that allows him to juggle such a range of responsibilities, and noted that using new technology “is now a necessary part of doing business.”

He added, “I’ve always been a bit of a computer geek and in optometry school I was the first person to bring a laptop to [class]. I knew when I graduated and as soon as I got my own practice that I wanted to go paperless. So I’ve been paperless in my office since 2006.”

Cass said his plans to upgrade and remodel the practice he purchased required that he offset the costs by finding more efficient ways to operate the business, and finding ways to save both time and money. “Technology has been a big part of it along the way,” he noted.

He first got involved with Glimpse Live a little over a year ago, when he was still using a spreadsheet to track practice performance. “The EHR software does a good job of gathering the data, but it doesn’t do so great a job of outputting the data in a usable, easy-to-read drill-down format,” he said. “That is why I went to Glimpse. A, it automates the data-gathering and B it puts it into very easy to digest formats.”

Glimpse also provides him with capabilities for in-depth analytics and live benchmarking. Cass said the key metrics that Glimpse provides and that he regularly tracks are billing, collection and per-patient revenue. “I want to know what we billed because that is a good indicator of how much money is likely to come in over the next few days or weeks, and I want to see collection because I want to know exactly where the business is at,” he explained.

Glimpse, which was developed by private business owners, calls itself the industry’s first “Push” informatics service that measures and tracks performance, identifies growth opportunities, forecasts future trends and compares results among peers. The Glimpse program interacts with the practice’s database to create daily reports that enable ECPs to instantly track total business performance and anonymously benchmark results against peers both regionally and nationally.

“When I am benchmarking my practice, I am not actually benchmarking it against the average practice,” Cass noted. “I am benchmarking it against a group of better-than- average practices, which really pushes our practice to be the best it can be.”