Running practice-based and domiciliary optical services together

Can one system run both practice and domiciliary work?

Yes, and the reason to want it is continuity of the patient record rather than uniformity of the software. A patient who has been coming into your practice for fifteen years and now needs visiting at home is the same patient, with the same history, prescriptions and spectacles. Splitting them across two systems is how history gets lost.

What you should not expect is that both teams see the same screens. The work is genuinely different. A shop needs stock, a retail till, cash-up and online booking. A visiting clinician needs a visit diary, access notes, a direct route into the examination and a way to record a payment that was taken elsewhere. Software that forces one shape onto both makes somebody's day harder.

How ZenOptix handles this

ZenOptix is one product with no feature tiers. There is one plan for each way of working: independent practice, multi-branch organisation, and domiciliary or mobile. A practice chooses the way it works when it is set up, and the application then shows the workflow that fits, so a mobile optician is not given stock control and a shop is not given a visit diary.

That is a deliberate design choice rather than a restriction to be unlocked. It also means the question for a mixed provider is a commercial and operational one: how your practice and your domiciliary service are structured, and therefore how they are set up. That is worth discussing directly rather than assuming, because the right answer depends on whether the domiciliary service is a separate operation or an extension of the practice.

What to work through before you choose

Take a patient who currently attends the practice and will soon need visiting at home, and walk their next two years through any system you are considering. Where does their record live? Who can see it? What happens to their recall? If they are dispensed at home, does that order sit alongside the ones dispensed in store?

Then do the same for a member of staff. If an optometrist works three days in the practice and one day visiting, what do they see on each? Role-based access and how a person moves between settings is easier to get right at setup than to retrofit.

Where the two workflows genuinely differ

It helps to be concrete about the differences rather than treating domiciliary as a lesser version of the practice workflow.

In the practice you have retail stock, a full till and cash-up, a patient portal for online booking, and a website booking widget. On a visit you have a Visit Diary holding the setting and access details, representative and carer context, direct access to the full eye examination, dispensing without a retail stock catalogue, a Lab Order PDF with Send to Lab, fulfilment by delivery, post or collection, and a simple payment screen that records what was taken rather than processing it.

Neither list is a subset of the other. They are two shapes of the same product.

Questions worth asking any supplier

Ask to see the same patient in both contexts. Ask what a clinician sees on a tablet in a front room and what a dispensing assistant sees at the counter. Ask how recalls are handled for a patient whose contact route is a relative rather than their own mobile.

Ask about the boundaries plainly. For ZenOptix: there is no offline mode, no route optimisation, no automatic care-home session planning, and no patient portal or online booking within the domiciliary workflow. GOS claims and referrals are prepared in ZenOptix rather than transmitted electronically to PCSE or e-RS. A supplier that answers those questions directly is easier to plan around than one that does not.