Leo MacCanna is both an entrepreneur and an electrical engineer. That’s an unusual combination, but one that has led to great success for Ocuco, his Dublin-based software and EMR business.

The name? “It stands for ocular company. It’s all about eyes and so are we,” explains MacCanna.

“I founded Ocuco, which was focused on eye care from the beginning, after I graduated from university in 1993. I started out on the clinical side writing software and actually slept on the floor of a local ECP’s exam room trying to get our software to work.”

Today, the company has approximately 325 staff members serving some 10,000 customers across 80 countries.

“Our product is very broad-based for the eyecare space,” says MacCanna. “It covers everything from a scheduler through EMR, point of sale, practice management, CRM, and all the digital imaging...all those things that an eyecare practitioner needs.”

Here, the Ocuco founder/CEO discusses tech, sustainability, and what’s next for the company.

EB: Tell us about your business in the U.S.

LEO MacCANNA: It took us until 2011 to extend our retail software footprint into the U.S., first with FYidoctors and Kaiser Permanente. That got us a toehold in the U.S.

Ours is an integrated system. Most of the software systems in the U.S. are what we would call point solutions. One does point of sale, for example, and somebody else does scheduling, etcetera.

We, on the other hand, provide a scheduler, online scheduler, a point of sale, CRM, EMR, as well as the retail end and are quite strong on integrated omnichannel functionality. We cover a much broader swath of the needs of an optical practice.

EB: How do you keep up with technology for customers?

LM: Ocuco spends a lot of money on R&D. We’re investing at least as much as any of the major chains are, per annum. You can have a piece of it by licensing, and it puts you on equal footing with your online competitors and big chains when it comes to technology.

Ocuco is a pure software play. We don’t make money out of insurance and we don’t make money out of selling product. It’s a monthly fee for a particular footprint of our software that you wish to have or for the whole thing. The results? To mention just a couple, one customer had a 74% increase in the revenue generated by online bookings and another showed a 3.6-times return on investment.

EB: What’s next?

LM: Internally, we’re trying to go carbon neutral. We’re redeveloping our offerings into one new—and integrated—big product on a new platform.

It’ll be different to others in that we’re building an omnichannel natively into the system. We hope to pilot it with some U.S. clients the second half of 2022.