About | Humint

WHY HUMINT?
Designed for optometry.
Built for your future.

HUMINT is practice management software for South African optometrists, built on more than twenty years in the optical industry.

We combine powerful features that save you time, help you care for more patients and grow your practice with confidence.

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Why I built HUMINT

I have spent more than twenty years in the optical industry. For much of that time I built and supported TOMS — Total Optometric Systems — written in Visual Basic 6 on a SQL Server database. It took the paper out of the practice at a time when almost every optometrist in the country still kept patient records in a filing cabinet.

But TOMS lived where all software of that era lived: on a server in the back room. When that server went down, the practice went with it. Nobody could open a patient record or invoice a patient, and everything stopped until it was fixed. Often the wait for support took longer than the fault itself.

So I started again. HUMINT is built on Odoo, the platform behind hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide, and it runs in a browser on any device from anywhere. There is still a server — it just sits in a data centre where we look after it, instead of in your back room where you have to. Taking the paper out of the practice was the first step. Taking the server out is the second.

What I did not start again on was the listening. Every part of HUMINT was shaped by optometrists telling me what actually happens in a practice, and that has not stopped.

The name says it. HUMINT is the intelligence world’s term for what you learn from people by asking them and listening to the answers. It is how this software was built, and it is how optometry has always worked — a patient tells you something in the chair that no instrument will show you. Our job is to handle the data so that you can concentrate on them.