Opening a new practice means making every equipment dollar count. The right diagnostic technology expands what you can offer patients from the first week, building the clinical foundation your practice needs for long-term growth without buying everything at once.
New practices face a unique constraint: limited capital and unlimited potential. The equipment you choose in your first year determines the clinical capability you offer patients and shapes your practice’s growth for years to come. Equipment that sits idle is a liability; equipment your patient base actually needs is an asset. Before committing to any of the packages below, the OCT and retinal imaging break-even calculators will tell you what each instrument has to do per week to carry its own monthly payment. Owning an instrument does not by itself make a service payable. That depends on payer enrollment, credentialing, coverage policy, and documentation, not on the equipment alone.
The good news is that you do not need everything at once. A focused equipment strategy built around broadly useful diagnostics gives you meaningful clinical capability on opening day while leaving room to scale as patient volume grows. The packages below represent the combinations Whitecotton Vision sees working best for cold start practices at different budget levels, each one designed to maximize diagnostic breadth relative to the investment.
Equipment Packages
Four proven equipment combinations for new practices, from lean essentials to a complete diagnostic suite. Each package is designed to deliver broad diagnostic capability from opening day.
The leanest way to open with the core diagnostic categories covered. The DRSplus delivers push-button automated retinal imaging for fundus documentation, and the IC200 covers IOP in any position without drops or a slit lamp. The VF2000 is the reason visual fields fit in this package at all: it is a wearable headset, so it needs no perimetry room, no lane and no dedicated footprint, which counts for more in a cold start than almost anywhere else. Surgenex adds an ocular surface offering from the day the doors open.
The same categories as Option A, reached a different way. Where Option A splits retinal imaging and visual fields across two instruments, the COMPASS does both in one, and its fundus-guided perimetry tracks the retina during the test, so structure and function are registered to each other from the first visit. Choose this over Option A when the practice expects real glaucoma volume and wants defensible progression data from day one. Choose Option A when room and budget are tighter than the glaucoma case mix. Pair either with the IC200 for drop-free IOP and Surgenex for the ocular surface.
The EIDON UWF provides 200-degree ultra-widefield TrueColor retinal imaging that will anchor a diagnostic suite for many years. COMPASS adds threshold perimetry with retinal tracking, so structure and function are documented on the same patient in the same visit. With the IC200 for IOP and Surgenex for the ocular surface, this combination covers the diagnostic categories most new practices lean on hardest.
Everything in the moderate package plus the Optovue Solix OCTA platform and the VX120 pretest station. OCT gives the practice cross-sectional imaging for glaucoma management, macular disease and anterior segment analysis; the VX120 compresses autorefraction, keratometry, topography, pachymetry and tonometry into one pretest seat. This is the configuration that lets a cold start handle any diagnostic scenario from opening day.
Opening a new practice is complex enough without juggling multiple equipment vendors, separate installations, and disconnected support channels. Working with Whitecotton Vision simplifies the equipment side of your cold start.
Tell us about your new practice and we’ll help you design an equipment package that fits your budget, your clinical goals, and your opening timeline.