Optometry Practices, Vision Benefit Expiry Recovery Engine

Independent optometrists and small optical groups with 1 to 4 locations and an active patient list of 2,000 or more. The ideal buyer owns their own dispensary (so the recovered exam carries optical revenue behind it), runs on a practice-management system you can export a CSV from, and already spends $1,500-$3,000 a month on Google Ads chasing new patients. Find them through state optometric association member directories, the exhibitor and attendee lists at Vision Expo, local Google Maps searches for independents that are not Lenscrafters, Target Optical or Warby Parker, and optometry owner groups on Facebook and LinkedIn where capture rate and recall compliance come up constantly.

The opening question that qualifies them in 30 seconds: how many of your patients are sitting on unused benefits right now? Nobody knows, and that is the sale. Skip the corporate-owned locations, they cannot buy software.

Skip ophthalmology practices with no dispensary, the economics are thinner.

The practice exports their patient list from their practice-management system as a CSV, including last exam date, last lens purchase, last frame purchase and the plan name on each record. The app imports it, then uses AI to match messy plan strings like "vsp-sig" and "V.S.P. Signature" onto a plan rules library the practice fills in once.

That library is where the real work happens: each plan gets its reset type (calendar year, employer plan year, or rolling 12 or 24 months from the last date of service), its frequency per benefit type, and its frame allowance. A nightly engine then calculates, per patient and per benefit, whether they are eligible right now, the exact date that eligibility disappears, and roughly how many dollars are on the table. A scoring formula multiplies the dollar value by deadline urgency and by how likely that patient is to buy, producing a ranked daily work queue for the front desk.

A three-wave campaign goes out alongside it: a long itemised email 90 days out, email plus SMS at 45 days, a short SMS at 14 days, all of them stopping dead the moment a patient books or opts out. Before any staff member quotes a dollar figure on the phone, the app makes them check the carrier portal and record the verified amount, so the estimate never becomes a promise the practice cannot keep. The owner gets a dashboard showing recovered revenue, optical capture on campaign-sourced visits, and one number that tends to close the renewal by itself: total benefit dollars still unclaimed, with the nearest expiry date.

Build time is one day for a competent operator, two if the client's export is messy. The plan rules library is the part that takes real effort on the first client, budget 60 to 90 minutes sitting with the practice to get the reset types right, because getting a plan year wrong sends a patient the wrong date and that is the one error they will notice. Expect 15 to 25% of imported plan strings to need manual mapping on the first pass.

On results: a practice with 3,000 active patients typically finds 400 to 800 with something eligible and unused, and campaign-sourced booking rates in the 8 to 15% range on a well-built list are realistic. Optical capture on those visits usually runs at or above the practice's baseline, which sits around 50-55% for most independents against 60-75% at healthy ones, because a patient who came in specifically to spend an allowance walks in already intending to buy. Two caveats worth saying out loud to the client.

First, there is no live carrier eligibility feed in this build, so every figure is an estimate until the front desk verifies it, by design. Second, the end of December is a hard wall, so a client who signs in November gets one compressed run at the calendar-year cohort and should be sold on the full year rather than on a single Q4 sprint. Shipping it through AppBuild.DIY matters here more than on most builds, because the front desk works this queue standing up between patients and push notifications on new callbacks beat an email nobody opens.