The importance of care plans to veterinary practices

As a veterinary professional, your heart is in the quality care you provide for your patients. Preventing issues and treating ailments early is a shared goal. Care plans (also known as wellness plans) deliver on this goal by empowering you and your teams to focus on your important work while helping clients afford the healthcare their pet needs.

The veterinary industry is at a crucial juncture. You’re likely aware of the challenges facing today’s practices. Veterinarians and support staff are leaving the workforce and online and consumer-direct offerings chip away at practice revenue.

You might look at your books and see that revenue is up, but those numbers are not guaranteed to hold steady. Inflation-linked price increases have caused pet parents to spend more on each veterinary visit, but what happens when they can no longer afford trips to your clinic?

According to Today’s Veterinary Business, general veterinary visits were down in 2022.¹ Keeping per-visit costs to your clients high may provide your bottom line with a temporary fix, but steep per-visit pricing is not a sustainable solution. Providing a complete care-plan program helps provide long-term potential for a steady, reliable revenue stream.

Offering your clients new ways to afford their pet’s care by empowering them to budget over time may help strengthen their loyalty. Flexible care plans can help you attract new clients, too.

Care plans help boost a practice’s financial prosperity because they can improve your business’s bottom line while helping to alleviate pressure on your clients’ budgets. In short, care plans can be a win-win: by helping your clients care for their pets, you help your practice.

Care plans drive 10% revenue growth in the first year²

Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

Upon enrollment, your clients instantly become members of your care plan program. According to the report Why Wellness?, a membership approach may lead to several positive outcomes, such as more office visits, which can help increase compliance and improve care and more purchases of your out-of-plan product offerings and services. In addition, clients with pets on plans are more likely to listen to a veterinarian’s recommendations because the care-plan membership model has already fostered that loyalty and trust by its very design.³

It might seem counterintuitive that care plan clients spend more upfront if their goal is to budget, but the key is that spreading out costs allows people to plan, budget, and save, which affords them the ability to make the best possible choices for their pets.

The benefits of care plans for clients and veterinarians

Care plans can be mutually beneficial to the finances of both pet parents and veterinary practices.

On the pet parent side, the ability to budget care is beneficial, which is especially true for people experiencing financial hardship or uncertainty.

On the veterinary practice side, care plans even out cashflow and provide predictable practice revenue.

Dispelling myths about care plans

As great as care plans are for both vet practices and their clients, there are several myths out there that should be addressed.

Myth: Care plans are discount programs

Most care plans focus on value, not discounted services. An overwhelming amount of data shows that discounting is not a key driver in whether consumers sign up for wellness plans.⁴

Care plan programs that focus on value can stick to their retail pricing while offering affordable monthly payments pet owners appreciate.

Myth: A care plan is too much work to maintain

This does not have to be the case. Having the right partner can help to relieve the workload. With the Covetrus^® platform, the ongoing management of care plans is minimal.

Instead of having to spend valuable time trying to recover payments, you can rely on Covetrus^® CarePlans software to act as a recurring billing system, setting up a recurring charge to your client’s credit card. The CarePlans software, along with the CarePlans Call Center, helps reduce the calls your veterinary practice needs to make to track down missing payments. Marketing materials can also help promote care plans to your clients, which takes that responsibility off your plate as well.

Choosing the right partner

It is never too late to find the right care plan solution for your veterinary practice. As a partner, Covetrus provides a complete pet wellness solution that combines software and professional services to make managing a complete care program easy.

We designed CarePlans to help keep the veterinarian at the heart of pet healthcare by making our framework customizable to any practice’s unique protocols. Our technology’s cutting-edge functionality, with the flexibility to add and remove optional services at any time, ensures the plan addresses changing treatment needs. You then can help more pets by offering preventive care, treatment, dental-only and chronic illness plans, optional services, and more.

Visit Covetrus CarePlans to learn more.

¹ “Upon final analysis: Price increases drove the veterinary industry in 2022, but what about this year?” Today’s Veterinary Business, April 2023. https://todaysveterinarybusiness.com/veterinary-industry-pet-owners-0423/

² Why Wellness? [white paper], Covetrus/VCP, 2020.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.