CLEVELAND - eTradeWire -- Many eye practices still decide how many technicians a clinic needs by counting patients. But a patient count doesn't tell you the work: a morning of post-op checks and a morning of new patients needing dilation and testing can show the same count with very different technician workloads. A proficient technician ideally handles three to four patients an hour, a figure that doesn't account for OCT or visual fields, a common bottleneck in clinic flow.

Kestrel Ridge Health LLC, an Ohio company, is building software to staff by the work. It forecasts the technician minutes each half-day session will need, from its mix of appointment types and the provider's historical pace, then drafts a staffing plan from the practice's own roster: which technicians are trained for which tests, which offices each covers, and weekly hours. Plans require human approval by a second person by default.

Now the numbers, straight. The company has tested this only on synthetic sessions it generated itself, so the results are not evidence about any real clinic. On 2,318 synthetic sessions, the model's average error was 23.76 minutes per session; a simpler linear regression came in at 24.01; a spreadsheet multiplying patients by average provider time came in at 33.42; a fixed staffing ratio came in at 208.61. The company's read: planning by the session matters more than the algorithm, and only a practice's own history can show whether that holds.

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Phase Zero protects the downside first. A practice exports its own operational counts. Kestrel Ridge Health retrains the forecast on that history and compares it with the practice's current ratio and a simple historical average. If the forecast doesn't beat both, the engagement stops. It is a fixed fee.

"Ten post-op checks and ten new patients are both ten patients. They are not the same morning for your techs," said Thomas Wagenberg, co-founder of Kestrel Ridge Health. "We test it on the practice's own numbers first. If we don't beat what the practice does today, we stop, and the finding is theirs."

The plain facts: the software has not been validated on real clinic data, is not HIPAA certified, and is not connected to any EHR or scheduling system. The company has no customers yet.

About Kestrel Ridge Health An Ohio company based in the Cleveland area, building technician staffing software for ophthalmology practices, starting with Phase Zero, a fixed-fee diagnostic run on a practice's own history. Results: https://kestrelridgehealth.com/evidence/.