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For those of you consider PM and EMR in your ECP practice, I’d give Officemate a look. I am. A cool feature about their support service is that they not only have an online knowledge base, the knowledge base comes with an RSS feed! Very cool. Officemate must be one of those progressive companies.
I noticed they recently redesigned their website. At first they didn’t have up any barcode scanner partnerships, but now I see they have it back, including one that is bluetooth wireless, so you can walk around the room scanning stuff.
I don’t know why they partner with a tablet PC company if in their hardware specs they state that wireless computing is not recommended. I plan on implementing some of my computeres as wireless, so I’ll let you know how that goes.
Yes, right now I am planning on buying officemate. It’s been a long road of research, but for the money, I get the most features with officemate. I just hope the add-ins like barcode scanners and the box for integrating pretesting equipment doesn’t throw the savings out the window.

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Neckties of doctors containing bacteria are old news; however, I saw a news report on it again this week. There are those who advocate the abolishing of neckties from the doctor’s office and hospitals. I won’t complain about that, but isn’t there another alternative to think about?

How come the necktie industry hasn’t come up with washable ties? In our day of space-age fabrics and technology, surely someone somewhere can manage to successfully market washable ties.

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Actually, I love retinoscopy. I find that for me it is more accurate on kids than the autoRx. Anyway, an alert Optiboarder happened upon this [broken link- does anyone know where it is now?retinoscopy simulator. Since it’s in Spanish, allow me to translate.

The green circle on the left side is a spherical plus lens, the left red circles are minus lenses. To actually put the lens in front of the eye, you must click on the circle you want. The middle number is the retinoscope’s light orientation in degrees. The red and green circles on the right are minus and plus cyl respectively. Obviously, those of us belonging to the primary eye care profession won’t have need for the plus cylinder. Adjust the minus cylinder axis in front of the eye by clicking on the red circle to put it in play, the click on the little 3-circle-icon below it until it orients to where you want it.

The dice are to generate random patients. If you want to test yourself, then close both of the eyes by clicking on them.
If you want to generate an Rx yourself to see what it looks like, then you can adjust the controls by first clicking on the type you want, Myopia, Hyperopia, SMA, CMA, SHA, CHA, and mixed (in that order) then press the up and down buttons next to sphere, cylinder, and axis (in that order). The astigmatism value is limited to a maximum of 6D. I’ve personally seen patients with 7.50, but I suppose they are simulating a phoropter without the accessory lenses.

In the lower right corner is the working distance adjustment. If you normally use the R +1.50 lens in the phoropter, then leave the “Compensacion por distancia de trabajo” at zero. But if I wanted to simulate skiascopy racks, then I’d put my working distance at 1.50, and then I would only use the spherical lenses on the left.

Anyway, I thought this might be useful for optometry students to hear about. It also looks cool.

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I thought the state of Utah was already beyond the pale with their blatent anti-optometry ruling in Optometry vs. IHC. Now, certain Utah state legislators want to take it further.

Utah Senate Bill 176-SO1 wants to take away a common contact lens industry practice of private labeling. You know, the Biomedics 55-type lenses that are custom wrapped for different businesses. Mostly I just see the big box stores do this, but I suppose there are still private practice ODs out there doing it; however, I believe most private practice ODs should have already switched to silicone hydrogels exclusively for regular spherical lenses since they are healthier for the eye and usually have a better margin.

Anyway, the proposed law has already been recommended by the Business and Labor Committee. I find it ironic that the State legistlature has already done away with the mandatory seat belt use this session citing the notion that:

“This is a case of taking away a personal choice or freedom without sufficient cause,” [Senator] Christensen said.

Well, how about the nosey government getting in the way of a patient-doctor relationship? How about the patient’s right to refuse some private label? They can advise their doctor that they only want a lens available anywhere.

This is also a Darwinian matter. The doctors supporting private label schemes get selected against by savvy consumers while un-savvy consumers get selected against by getting trapped into a unilateral source.

Why didn’t they just make a law requiring contact lens patients to buy a full year supply up front instead of going somewhere else? If the legislature is really intent on benefitting patients, then they should think about the eye health of all those people over-wearing their contact lenses, getting eye diseases, all just to save a couple bucks. If they want to be consistent, then these Nazis Utah legislators in bed with 1800CL should enact laws to MAKE them buy a 1 year supply upon getting a CL Rx.

What’s comical is that the proposed bill:

19 . provides for certification of contact lenses with the Utah attorney general;
20 . requires the attorney general to maintain a listing of all brands of contact lenses that
21 have been certified with the attorney general; and
22 . provides penalties for violation of the certification provisions.

Won’t that be great! There are no monies appropriated to this bill, and in the fiscal note, they claim that “It is estimated that provisions of this bill can be implemented with existing resources.”
So the UT Attorney General staffers are going to do what a whole business called Tyler’s Quarterly does? I can already hear the cursing from the AG’s office about all the busy-work they’re going to have to do.

Let’s also scrutinize this sentence from the bill:

(1) “Alternative channels of distribution” means a mail order company, Internet retailer, pharmacy, buying club, department store, or mass merchandise outlet, without regard to whether it is associated with an individual authorized to prescribe contact lenses under this chapter.

Guess which Utah company the top 2 alternate channels describe? 1800CL. Which Utah company could have the clout to push a needless bill like this one? You guessed it.

This whole thing is a big sham. The only people who could possibly want to legislate this issue are 1800CL and their employees. If we have the freedom to choose to not wear a seat belt, then we also have the freedom to discuss with our doctor which brand of lens we’re going to try out. If (s)he persists in wanting to only Rx a private label, we also have the freedom to go somewhere else.

Next thing you know, they’re going to legislate that we can’t support our local grocery store. We’ll only be able to shop at Wal*Mart since their house brand of peanut butter is cheaper.

If you want to keep track of this bill’s progress, you can sign up for an e-mail notification.

BTW, the UT state senator who proposed this bill publicly revealed a “Health care” confict of interest.

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For techies out there that use Wordpress and Google Adsense, I just spent a long time figuring out something I heard about at acmetech.com.

The idea, as I understand it, is if someone searches your blog for something, but does not return any results, then you can display a little Google Search box with their search word(s) inside whose action searches Google using your Adsense account number so that you get advertising credit for any click throughs.

I didn’t immediately understand from the acmetech site where to insert their code snippit, and also the text didn’t have the right coding (the apostrophies and quotation marks especially weren’t compatible).
So if you want to try this out, edit in your default template the index.php file (which inside the WP control panal-Presentation-Theme Editor they call it “Main Template”).

Then here is the text code snippit from acmetech.com that I reformatted.

Right-click the above link to save the file to your desktop, open it in WordPad, copy and paste the text into your default template’s index.php file between
<?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?>

and

< ?php endif; ?>

You may also notice if you test this out on my website, that the url now says optoblog.com/search/yoursearchterm instead of optoblog.com/index.php?s=yoursearchterm. They call it a “cruft free” URL, and I did it by following the directions at the WordPress codex site.
Enjoy!

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North Carolina democrats in the state legislature want to “repeal a requirement that kindergartners get a comprehensive eye exam.”
What the…? Shouldn’t the government pay for everything? We’re already paying for their breakfast and lunch. Why not an eye exam?

“I am surprised that (the senators) don’t want to do everything possible to detect early problems so those problems do not interfere with a child’s ability to learn for years,” Black said.

What about the parents? Are you going to tell me they shouldn’t want to do everything possible? You know, like maybe budget for an eye exam?

I’m just surprised this is a democrat motion. Where are the conservatives?

Of course you know what this means. The dems took a lesson from Jimbo Carter and the AOA. It’s the eye doctors who should pay for children’s eye exams, so why should the government?:roll:

EDIT:
Whoops. This article explains that the law states the kids have to go get an eye exam on their own– it won’t be paid for by the state government; however, it has to be done before the kids get in school. They also site pediatricians and ophthalmologists that claim complete exams aren’t necessary because vision screenings are adequate.
I’m glad tax dollars aren’t used to pay for exams. I’m also glad that someone is trying to tear down unneeded government regulations.
I’m not impressed by the MD’s who say vision screenings are adequate. If that were true, wouldn’t we have an end to refractive amblyopia and other conditions that can be minimalized by early detection? Parents should take some responsibility and get their kid an eye exam per AOA recommendations. I feel that vision screenings give parents a false sense of security. Sure, not paying for something is convenient, but what about the parent whose kid got a false negative, could have obtained a complete exam, but didn’t bother since the kid supposedly passed the screening?

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