Prof. Dr. Aylin Kılıç.

Prof. Dr. Aylin Kılıç is an ophthalmologist specializing in cataract and refractive surgery and keratoconus treatment. Her Istanbul practice offers laser vision correction, cataract surgery, keratoconus treatment and dry eye treatments; a significant share of patients come from abroad and the practice serves in more than one language.

What sets the practice apart from a standard medical office is that it runs several different workflows side by side: patient follow-up, academic work, course organization and international patient processes. Off-the-shelf practice software is not enough here, because each flow has its own logic.

The method was classic: Excel, WhatsApp, phone notes, patient lists and information kept in different places. Each worked on its own, but they did not talk to each other. As the patient count and the team grew, reaching a single piece of information meant checking several separate places.

This had two concrete costs. The first was time: the same patient being called twice, a patient who should have been called being forgotten, digging through WhatsApp history for one piece of information. Small things one by one, but a serious loss by the end of the day.

The second was dependence on individuals. When an employee was on leave, it became hard to tell where the process they were following had left off.

The break did not come with one big event; it came with the accumulation of small hiccups. As the patient count rose, the same questions were asked more often: "Who was going to call this patient?", "When was the check-up?", "Did we get back to them?"

The real threshold was on the management side: understanding how the practice was running meant constantly asking someone. If there were a system, the manager should be able to see the big picture whenever they wanted, on their own.

Off-the-shelf practice programs, various CRM solutions and even having a custom system built were evaluated. What decided the choice was flexibility: rather than off-the-shelf practice software bending the practice to its own system, a structure that could adapt to the way the practice works was sought.

The team is also candid on one point: Zoho is not a system you learn right away at first glance. The price of flexibility is the obligation to set it up correctly.

What decided the practice's choice to work with Eksenium, Zoho partner in Türkiye, was that from the first meetings on, no one tried to sell a ready-made package. The need was not "let's set up a CRM" but to transfer the real process inside the practice into a digital environment correctly.

Throughout the process, not every topic landed on the same point the first time; the practice had to explain its need and the system had to be rethought accordingly. The practice's view on this offers a clear yardstick for how a partnership should be judged.

The setup took more time and effort than initially thought. The reason was not technical: while the system was being built, the practice's own way of working was being questioned again as well.

Questions that had not been dwelt on much before came up: "Why do we do this job this way?", "Is this stage really necessary?", "Who should follow this up?"

The division of roles was clear too: management described how the system should work, the team took an active role in daily use and the details. The part that took the most time was the practice clarifying its own workflows.

There was resistance. This sentence is always heard when moving to a new system, because people find the method they are used to easier, even if it is not better. In the first period some operations felt like extra work to the team.

The change sped up as the team saw that it was no longer entering the same information over and over or having to ask each other.

The most used side today is being able to see the practice's overall state from one place: which patient is at which stage, who has been called, who is waiting, which process is incomplete. Seeing these without asking anyone is management's most valuable gain.

The second gain is automations: the system reminding about tasks that should not be left to people's memory brings ease for both the manager and the team.

The change was not measured in percentages. The practice describes it as increased operational control: fewer questions are asked, the chance of two people doing the same job has dropped, the process does not stop on a day an employee is absent, and patient history and communication can be seen easily.

For a practice owner facing the same problem, the practice's advice is clear: do not choose software first, first try to understand your own process. From the moment a patient first reaches the practice through treatment and the check-ups after it, which stages do they go through, who does what, where does information get lost. Once these are laid out, choosing the right system is much easier.