Optos plc


Optos provides innovative retinal imaging technology to assist in saving the sight of people who have conditions such as degenerative eye diseases, retinal tears, sports injuries and tumours. 

Best practice in: 	Broadband
Sector:			Healthcare
Size of firm:		130 employees
Location:		      Dunfermline, Scotland
Website:		 www.optos.com



Objectives: 

Sophisticated eye imaging equipment developed by Optos called Optomap Retinal Exam is supplied to opticians and eye specialists in the UK and the US. Established in 1994 from its base in Scotland the company now has additional offices in Boston and Toronto with further European expansion planned in the next year. The company's turnover has grown from £3.7 million in 2002 to approximately £10 million in 2003. Broadband was required to enable the company to achieve its rapid growth by maximising the efficiency of their internal operations across each of their offices and improving their ability to communicate electronically with their customers.

"Speed is of the essence in establishing a foothold in a new market," says Cathy Jackson, Marketing Manager. "Being a first entrant into this market, we couldn't have made so much progress without the use of the Internet through our broadband connections."


Solution: 

The company's broadband connections are through leased lines provided by UUNET with bandwidth of 1.5mbps which is scalable to 2mbps either on a weekly or permanent basis. They have also developed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) based on the broadband connections which provides secure access for the company's staff to the company's network through the VPN's encrypted channel. There is a company intranet that serves as the company's internal knowledge base and the development of an extranet for their clients is planned for the future.


Results: 

The benefits of broadband to Optos have been recognised across all areas of the company encompassing customer service, internal operating efficiencies and marketing. 

More than 700 eyecare specialists now offer the Optomap Retinal Exam and over a million Optomap exams have been undertaken in total to date. Rather than charging an up-front fee for the equipment Optos charges the eyecare specialists on a per patient exam basis. The equipment is linked to Optos through the Internet enabling Optos to monitor the daily usage of each system and also usage patterns, diagnostic logs on the system performance and other key indicators. This results in a great deal of data for which the use of broadband is important. "Broadband enables fast exchange of data with remote customer sites on a daily basis. Not only does it help us cope with the sheer volume of data coming in and is used for billing, but we can also research user trends such as how long it takes each individual operator to complete an eye exam."

Broadband also enables Optos to email large image files that would take hours to handle over a 56k connection and which therefore improves the response times they can provide to their customers. "For example we have an expert in New Mexico who is often called on to look at images. We can e-mail the picture of the eye to him instantly and he reports back to the optician with what is being seen usually within 24 hours. In many situations the patient has been sent to hospital immediately as the condition detected needs urgent attention to prevent partial or full vision loss."

Within the organisation broadband also enables IT support to be provided to users remotely, wherever they are working. "We are able to use remote access to our users' computers to carry out work required, whether upgrades or fixes, without leaving our desks. This saves us time and enables us to provide a better and faster service to users, which in turn improves their productivity."

Effective marketing is critically important to Optos in expanding its client base and broadband enables Optos to achieve this. "Email campaigns to target market segments have been a cost effective and successful way to reach our potential customer base. It would take an unbelievable amount of time and money for salespeople to reach the volume of potential customers that can be contacted via email. This could not be done effectively without broadband."


Challenges: 

One of the challenges faced by Optos is the increasing geographical dispersion of the company and its customers as the company expands globally. To address this Optos has introduced video conferencing to improve the effectiveness of its long distance communications. This is used for both internal meetings and sales and marketing presentations. "This would not be possible without broadband. Good quality video requires a minimum of 512kbps bandwidth. Video conferencing saves in terms of both travel time and costs and enables better communication and results where travel would not be possible or appropriate, for example for a one hour meeting."


The last word:

"Life for us would be absolutely impossible without broadband," says Cathy. "It is difficult to quantify how much money it has saved us - without it we would probably need a fully-staffed call centre and probably double the number of employees to collate and process all the data available."