Offices of all other health practitioners
This Canadian industry comprises establishments of health practitioners other than physicians, dentists, mental health practitioners, optometrists, chiropractors, audiologists, and physical occupational and speech therapists, primarily engaged in providing health services. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 8,409
- Under 10 employeesA
- 91%
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 8,409 Canadian establishments with employees, 91% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 621, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Licensed professions with private-pay segments — dentistry, optometry, physiotherapy — are being consolidated by groups buying from retiring owners. The licence-holder shortage is the binding constraint.
- Who sets the price
- Public insurers for physician services; the practice for dental, vision, therapy and veterinary-adjacent care.
- The software it runs on
- Electronic records and practice management, split by profession, with insurer billing as the lock-in.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 6213 Offices of other health practitioners covers it.
How chiropractic differs from rehab therapy (621340). Rehab software is built around insurance: WebPT and its rivals compete on documentation that survives payer and Medicare review, and the visit is billed to a third party. A chiropractic office sells many more short visits, usually as a care plan: a course of adjustments scheduled ahead and often paid up front or as a monthly membership. Part of the profession runs cash-only. That changes what the software has to do. It needs recurring card billing for memberships and prepaid plans, a ledger for plan balances, fast spinal-adjustment SOAP templates, and personal-injury and auto-accident case files alongside ordinary insurance claims. Discounting is also a compliance problem: charging cash patients less than insurers invites dual-fee-schedule trouble. A whole product, ChiroHealthUSA, exists to sell practices a 'compliant membership model' as a discount medical plan; it claims 7,700+ providers [C, vendor]. These are analyst framings of the workflow; the vendor pages confirm the features (ChiroSpring sells 'Memberships', ChiroTouch's CT Pay sets up recurring payments, ClinicMind sells a 'Cash-Only / Private Pay' plan) [C, vendor]. The incumbent is ChiroTouch, and it now sits inside a private-equity roll-up. It claims 12,500+ chiropractic practices [C, vendor]. K1 bought it in 2014, Waud Capital Partners took a stake in 2017 [B, socaltech], and in September 2023 Waud's platform (Integrated Practice Solutions, whose chiropractic line is ChiroTouch) merged into PracticeTek under Lightyear Capital majority ownership, with Greater Sum Ventures and Waud keeping stakes [B, Lightyear release]. PracticeTek also owns ChiroSpring, the cloud challenger that sells memberships; ChiroSpring's founder is quoted on PracticeTek's site, and the two share a San Diego address [C]. So the incumbent and one of the best-reviewed challengers have the same owner. Second consolidator: ClinicMind, which absorbed Genesis Chiropractic Software (its homepage now offers 'ClinicMind EHR 1.0 formerly Genesis') and sells EHR plus outsourced billing [A for the merger; date January 2024 from search summary, not opened]. The best-funded challengers. ChiroHD (Atlanta, founded 2017) raised $26M of growth capital from Mainsail Partners in April 2025 [B]. Jane (North Vancouver) is multi-discipline rather than chiropractic-only. It raised under $10M of primary capital, including $2M of CIBC debt in 2019 [B], and was valued at about $1.8B in a May 2025 secondary of $500M-plus led by TCV with JMI Equity and Tidemark [B]; reported revenue was about US$100M [B, The Logic via techcouver]. Practice Better (Toronto; US$27M led by Five Elms, April 2023, and US$13M of CIBC growth debt, November 2024) [B] named chiropractors as a target vertical when it raised. A new entrant would face a PE-owned incumbent that already bundles payments and recurring billing, a venture-funded cloud challenger aimed squarely at it, and a Canadian multi-discipline platform worth more than any of them. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. No vendor publishes revenue except Jane's reported figure.
Two forces squeeze the independent optometrist from opposite ends. Below, the optical chains sell the glasses that carry the margin — National Vision alone runs 1,250 stores on $1.99B of revenue, with an exam priced as a loss leader for the frame sale. Above, the elective procedures that would lift the average ticket are performed in surgical centres the practice does not own, and online lens retail keeps taking the repeat purchase. The exam is the least profitable part of the visit, and it is the only part an independent reliably controls. Note what the chain's own filing now shows: the footprint is no longer expanding quickly. After exiting its Walmart and AC Lens businesses in fiscal 2024, National Vision opened 33 stores and closed 23 in fiscal 2025 for a net gain of ten — 0.8% — and guides to 30–35 openings in fiscal 2026 against 69 in fiscal 2024. Growth is coming from the existing base instead: comparable store sales rose 5.9%, and managed care is now 42% of revenue.
How this differs from general EHR and practice management (6211). The general record is about Epic and the hospital market, where certification and clinician training decide who wins. An optometry office is a clinic with a shop attached. The software has to run the eye exam (refraction, pre-test device data, retinal imaging) and also an optical store: frame and contact-lens inventory, a point-of-sale counter, and lens orders sent to labs. The money side runs on two tracks. Routine eye exams and eyewear are paid through vision plans (VSP, EyeMed and others), which have their own eligibility checks, authorizations and claims. Medical eye care is billed to ordinary health insurance. Generic EHRs do not do frames, lab orders or vision-plan claims, which is why the category exists. The incumbent is a payer. Eyefinity is part of VSP Vision, the largest vision plan, and sells the only optometry software with a direct connection to VSP for real-time eligibility, authorizations and claims [C, vendor]. That claims link is the moat. In October 2025 NextGen Healthcare licensed it too: its ophthalmology and optometry customers now get Eyefinity's VSP claims, frame inventory, point of sale and lab ordering [B, NextGen release]. The independents are old and private. RevolutionEHR (Madison, founded 2006, majority-owned by the RevOptix investor group since 2014 [B]) claims 13,000+ eye care professionals [C]. Crystal PM (Austin) claims 8,000+ independent optometry providers [C]. Compulink (since 1985) also sells to ophthalmology and other specialties. Sightview, formerly Eye Care Leaders, was sold to unnamed owners in July 2024 and carries My Vision Express alongside iMedicWare, Medflow and ManagementPlus [B]. Ocuco (Dublin; €60M minority investment from Accel-KKR in 2023 [B]; 6,750+ sites in 88 countries [C]) sells optical retail and lab software, and its Canadian arm grew out of the EMRlogic acquisition. The one funded newcomer is small. Barti raised a $12M Series A led by Five Elms Capital in August 2025, with AOAExcel (the American Optometric Association's for-profit arm) as an investor [B]. It sells an AI-first all-in-one system and has onboarded about 200 practices [C]. Patient messaging is a separate layer owned by Weave (NYSE: WEAV; $239.0M revenue in 2025, 39,625 customer locations across dental, optometry and other verticals [A]), and Eyefinity lists Weave as an integration partner. The buyer is consolidating. By the end of 2023, private-equity platforms ran hundreds of offices each: MyEyeDr 842, AEG Vision 400+, EyeCare Partners 385+, Keplr Vision 278 [B, Vision Monday]. Those groups standardise on one system and negotiate enterprise terms, which leaves a shrinking independent market split among 25-year-old vendors that each claim thousands of providers. A new entrant would need the vision-plan claims link the payer owns, the device and lab integrations the incumbents built over two decades, and a buyer that is not being acquired. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. No optometry software vendor publishes revenue.
SimplePractice has the solo and small-group therapist market at scale and sits behind EQT's balance sheet, but the harder problem is the payer-network model: Headway and Alma give practice software away because they earn on the claim. Competing with free-plus-revenue against a buyer who is also being offered patient flow is not a wedge. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Sold across the wider branch
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Health care and social assistance, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. But note the shape of this industry: 91% of establishments have fewer than ten employees, and at that size most of these roles are one person wearing several hats, or bought in from outside.