Hey there—

I’m Perry Brill, the founder here. I’ve been running Eyetrepreneur— the business that drives innovation for SpexBot and Eye Help You—for 5 years.

Practice owners are often dumbfounded when they find out these automation tools exist. The repetitive work tasks that used to require deep expertise and complex processes are now on autopilot. 

I wish I could credit a spark of genius, or some deep insight. But I can’t. Truth is, it was just really me hammering out all my knowledge of optometry operations onto Google Docs, drawing some amateur diagrams on Canva, and hiring a smart development team.

I’m not a software engineer. I can’t write a line of code. I’m an optician and practice management dude.

My backstory is working alongside my parents at our family practice, Brill Eye Center, established in 1983. My secret weapon is 10+ years of working in the trenches. I saw what went down and now I have the technical chops to apply software fixes to it.

I thought I had all the operations and processes figured out. Well, I kinda did. It was a human chain of commands and well trained people that could follow directions and think critically. 

We were fooling ourselves. Sound familiar? Lots of silly errors slipped by and task work always piled up. Backlogs of claims, return phone calls to make, and a big list of vision plan verifications to constantly pull.

It wasn’t that we didn’t have the skills — we just didn’t have the right tools, nor the method, to juggle the growing workload. We were disorganized, we were dropping balls, and stuff was slipping.

Quality was suffering, and, as is often the case in situations like this, our patients noticed before we noticed. That was the especially painful and uncomfortable part.

We needed a better way to perform repetitive task work and not be so reliant on super trained staff. Our A-player staff was staring at computers performing data entry rather than actively helping patients generating revenue.

We tried spreadsheets, team chat groups, scattered documents, and weekly huddles. Information here, there, and everywhere just wasn’t cutting it. Systems like that work for a minute, and then they fall apart fast — especially as you grow and add more people to the mix.

Fast forward to March 2020, I left the family biz to launch a consulting business within eyecare. I realized within the first year I personally don’t enjoy traditional practice consulting. 

I was so focused on some silly checklist of transformational changes a practice could make that it clouded the real issues. The fundamental challenges within practices are vision claims, medical claims, verification of medical insurance and vision plans, payment posting, order placement, order tracking, and patient communication.

I knew if I could semi or fully automate these, that would relieve offices of a solid chunk of the administrative burden.

By happenstance, I connected online with an optometrist in California that plays the Medicaid volume game. It’s low paying reimbursement so managing labor costs is key. Her practice’s average day is 75 complete pairs of eyeglasses billed to Medicaid and sent to the prison lab system. That’s 8+ hours of optician labor to hammer those out on the computer.

So I made a challenge for myself. I’ll build an app to submit all these orders/claims and generate packing slips too. If you like the app, you can buy it. If you don’t like it, no sweat, I learned a lot building my first tech product.

It was an instant hit.

So I tweaked it, tightened it up, polished the rough edges, and put it on the market for other Californians.

Turns out, thousands of other eyecare practices have similar struggles managing computer related data entry tasks. It’s a hamster wheel.

And about a year or so after our first app release, we started to build more apps.

Based on requests, feedback, and our own ideas, we’ve built a handful of automation apps that can handle back office work or communicate directly with the patient. We have a lot more to come with many ideas in the icebox.

SpexBot defined a category, and continues to constantly push that category forward in innovative ways.

It’s been an incredible ride so far, and we have so many people to thank. But most of all, we feel a deep sense of responsibility to continue to make the best product we can for eyecare practices big and small who desperately seek a better way to work. We’re here for them.

Thanks for reading, and for giving SpexBot a try. You can always contact me directly if you have any questions at perry@spexbot.com. I look forward to hearing from you.