The Statement I Could Not Make
In a couple of weeks we head to the AOPA National Assembly at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, September 9 through 12. We'll be in booth 827. Consider this your invitation, but I'd rather not spend 900 words asking you to stop by. Here's what's different this year, and you can decide whether it's worth the walk.
We’ve have a bad habit of promising things. Coming soon. On the roadmap. Q3 of some year. If you saw us last fall, you saw a web version of OPIE that handled a lot of the day but not all of it. The scheduler was missing pieces that you are used to. Parts ordering was still in development. Billing was in progress. Those were fair criticisms and we heard them.
The headline is parity
Everything you do in classic OPIE, you can now do in OPIE 2.0. That's the statement many of us at OPIE have been waiting to say for years.
It matters more than it sounds. Parity isn't a feature; it's the point where you can stop keeping two systems in your head. Billing now handles all claims and revenue cycle work in the new platform, including the formatted 1500, digital submission outputs landing automatically in Attachments, and a payments wizard that walks through repetitive posting. A few minor parity items are still on the list, and we'll say so out loud at the booth. But the major processing work is done.
The scheduler is no longer the sore spot either — four views on one calendar, a room monitor, waiting list, recurring appointments, and appointment cards you can color-code with billing markers. It's a genuinely better multi-branch scheduler than the one it replaced.
Ask OPIE is on every screen, and that's the whole idea
Most software bolts AI on in one place — a chatbot in the corner of the dashboard that you have to leave your work to go use. We went the other direction. OPIE was built from the ground up for AI. It is not an afterthought or a bolt-on…it is OPIE. You will see Ask OPIE floating on every screen in the program, so you interact where you already are.
In practice: you're on a patient record and want the case history without paging through a bunch of appointments and fourteen prescriptions, so you Ask OPIE for it and read the summary. Or you don't know what's holding a prescription up, so you ask what needs to happen next. It also pulls data straight off a driver's license, a prescription, or an insurance card so nobody retypes it, and checks documentation against Local Coverage Determinations before a claim goes out. Start from a ready-made prompt or type or speak the question in your own words.
The other half is dictation. SmartScribe lets a clinician talk through an encounter and have it written into the note, running on AWS HealthScribe, which is medically tuned and HIPAA-eligible. Inside the note editor, a Transform function takes that raw dictation and reshapes it into a clean note.
The HIPAA piece is the one I'd want to know about if I were you. Plenty of practices have staff quietly pasting patient information into consumer AI tools right now, which is a compliance problem waiting to surface. Ours is built into the chart and built for protected health information from the start, the temptation goes away.
Margin before the work starts
If you own a practice, the screen worth your time is the Cost Analysis wizard. Pick your codes, let the fee schedule default from the primary insurance, and the margin calculator pulls live parts pricing from purchasing. Not last year's pricing, not an estimate somebody typed into a spreadsheet in 2023 — the actual number, before you commit material and labor to the job.
Most small practices I talk to find out what a device cost them somewhere between three weeks after and never. Fixing that changes your profitability.
The shop floor grew up
Last year we showed fabrication management. This year Operations is a full platform on its own release cycle: a configurable job board, step history with a real status trail, rollups for parts ordered and received, and automation that can advance WIP milestones without anyone opening another screen. Techs can print a QR code per job and scan it at the bench.
The chain runs end to end. A fabrication form in the chart opens as a job, goes to the board with priority and due dates, moves through steps on the floor, and reports live status back into the patient's active jobs. Nobody walks to the back to ask where something is.
Forms that fill themselves
Kiosk Mode lets you hand a patient or a referral source a tablet locked to one form, with no path into the chart. And the new Data Broker pre-populates form responses from what's already in the patient record and measurements. Author a layout once, publish it to every branch.
Setup also got consolidated into OPIE Dex, one directory for everything a practice configures once and uses everywhere — procedures, diagnosis codes, justifications, insurance companies, fees, providers, branches, rooms, chart templates.
If you're coming to Vegas
We're teaching Friday, September 11, from 10:30 to noon in Mandalay Bay L — "The Intelligent Practice: AI Transforming Sales, EMR, Compliance & Clinical Care," worth 1.5 CE. Less a product pitch than an honest conversation about where AI helps in O&P and where it doesn't yet. Saturday morning also has a guided comparison and expert panel on practice management systems in Mandalay Bay K, useful whether or not you use our software.
The exhibit hall opens with the Wednesday evening welcome reception and closes at four o'clock Friday. Paul, Regina, Susanne, Kelsey and I will all be there. Bring your hardest question. The ones we can't answer yet are more useful to us than the ones we can.
Closing Thought
A year is a long time in a small practice. You hired someone, lost someone, absorbed a payer rule change, and probably didn't have a spare afternoon to find out what your software started doing in the meantime. That's not a failure of attention, it's what running a business looks like.
So come find out. Booth 827. We'll skip the slides.
