We counted ours. Go count yours.

The complaint nobody puts on a demo agenda

Nobody switches EMRs over clicks. They switch over everything else, and then they
mention the clicks, every time, unprompted, for years.

It is the most common thing optometry says about its software and the least likely
thing to appear in a sales conversation. Too small to raise. Too constant to forget.

Forty extra clicks in an exam is not forty seconds. It is a rhythm you fight all day,
and it is the reason charting follows you home.

So here is our number

We instrumented four months of real charting in IrisMed and counted what it costs to
put a finding in the chart. These are vision therapy exams —
evaluations, progress checks, per-session therapy notes, neuro testing — because that
is the charting our practices do all day.

A comprehensive vision therapy evaluation: 102 fields recorded, 132 clicks.

A vision therapy session note: 12 fields, 12 clicks.

A progress check: 56 fields, 66 clicks.

Screens traversed, either one: one.

Clicks spent saving: none.

That works out to between 1.0 and 1.3 clicks per field that ends up in the record. A
click that opens a dropdown and a click that picks from it are both counted. The floor
is 1.0, because a field you fill costs at least one click to reach. We are sitting on
the floor.

The reason is not cleverness. Every section of the exam is open on one page, so there
is nothing to navigate between, and the chart saves itself, so there is nothing to
confirm. Almost every click you spend puts data in the record. Very few are spent
getting to the place where data goes.

The method, so you can argue with it

One click to reach a text, number, date, yes/no, checkbox or single-choice field. Two
for a dropdown or a multi-select — one to open, one to pick. Typing is not a click.
Tabbing to the next field is not a click.

We counted only fields that were actually filled, in exams that were actually charted.
Records opened and abandoned are excluded; leaving them in would have flattered us, by
reporting a median comprehensive exam of one field and one click.

We are telling you what we measured in our own production data, not what the industry
averages.

How to count yours

You do not need instrumentation. You need a colleague and ten minutes.

1. Pick one exam you run constantly. For a vision therapy practice that is a full
   evaluation or a progress check, not a quick recheck.
2. Open the chart. Start counting at the first click inside it.
3. Count every click that moves you between screens, opens a menu, or confirms a save.
4. Stop when the exam is signed.
5. Divide by the number of fields you actually filled.

Do it twice and take the lower number, in fairness to your own system.

The ratio is the honest comparison, not the raw total. A thorough exam should cost
more clicks than a brief one. What should not vary is how much you pay in clicks for
each thing you write down.

Why this bites hardest in vision therapy

A vision therapy practice charts differently from a general optometry practice, and
click cost compounds differently as a result. A VT patient is not one exam a year. It
is an evaluation, then twenty or thirty therapy sessions, each one charted, then
progress checks along the way, then a re-evaluation. The session note is short by
design — twelve fields — and you write it again and again and again.

Software priced in clicks per exam looks tolerable on an annual comprehensive. Run the
same arithmetic across a therapy block and the overhead is no longer a rounding error.
It is the difference between notes finished between patients and notes finished at
home.

That is the whole reason we measured the session note separately from the evaluation.
The short, repeated note is where a vision therapy practice actually lives, and it is
the number most likely to be missed by a vendor who only ever demos a comprehensive.

Why we are comfortable inviting the comparison

Because a number you generated yourself is more persuasive than any number we could
put on a page, and because the arithmetic is unkind to software that makes you travel
to your data.

We are not going to tell you what you will find. Count it.

Schedule a Demo

Bring your number. We will walk the same exam in IrisMed while you count.