Five ways a care plan program can help your veterinary practice

Does your practice offer care plan programs? If you’re looking to grow revenue while improving patient care, consider adding care plans, also known as wellness plans, as a new initiative. ¹

Care plans can help you provide consistent, quality care by preventing issues and treating ailments early. As a side benefit, the increased client focus on pet health strengthens pet owners’ relationship with their veterinarian, helps build client loyalty, and increases practice revenue from regular, budgeted visits. Flexible care plans can attract new clients, too.

How care plans work

When a client enrolls in your care plan program, they subscribe to a set of veterinary services with predictable costs. Subscription services have become popular recently¹ and can benefit clients from millennials to fixed-income retirees.

Care plans help boost financial prosperity by improving your business’s bottom line, evening out cashflow, and encouraging clients to purchase additional, off-plan products and services.

A complete care plan can also set your practice apart from competitors. The plan should be sufficiently robust to integrate other product and service areas from your practice to encourage clients to take full advantage of everything you offer. This can really pay off. Internal data from Veterinary Care Plans (VCP) has found that consistent usage of the practice’s products and services builds relationships and loyalty.²

Two common misconceptions of care plans are that they are discount plans and hard to manage. With Covetrus® CarePlans, you can provide affordable, personalized pet healthcare to your clients by using a tech solution and professional services that include automated administrative tasks which can help make your job easier.

Five top reasons to consider a care plan program

If you’re still on the fence, here are five compelling reasons to launch a care plan program this year:

1. Predictable client budgeting
Millennials, now the largest generation of pet parents, have grown up on subscription services and monthly subscription payment plans.³ Like other subscription services, care plans provide predictable payments for pet parents that they have come to expect. Plus, offering a budget-friendly care plan can reduce the number of clients who decline a veterinarian’s recommendation due to cost.

2. Improved efficiency

Care plan programs streamline practice flows. A self-sign-up capability allows clients to complete the enrollment process independently and at their convenience, saving staff time. Forward-booking appointments cuts down on time spent scheduling visits while setting client expectations. You can schedule your wellness visits when it’s convenient for both the pet parent and the practice.

3. Increased practice revenue
According to Today’s Veterinary Business, general veterinary visits were down in 2022.⁴ Increasing per-visit costs is only a temporary fix to a potential revenue problem, and steep per-visit pricing is not a sustainable solution. Creating a complete care plan program helps provide long-term revenue potential.

Care plan programs can help generate practice revenue by educating clients about the care their pets need, which helps to increase treatment compliance. Internal data from VCP shows that: 1) spending on pets enrolled in care plans is up to three times higher than spending on pets not enrolled in plans, 2) optional services can add more than 20% to wellness spending, and 3) overall care plans can drive 10% revenue growth in the first year.⁵

4. Vet flexibility
Covetrus® CarePlans is designed to keep the veterinarian at the heart of pet healthcare. Our framework is customizable to any practice’s unique services and protocols. Our cutting-edge functionality can add and remove optional services at any time, ensuring the ability to address changing treatment needs. You can then develop more types of care plans to help even more pets by offering preventive care, treatment, dental-only and chronic illness plans. Plus, you can add ancillary services such as grooming and boarding to further grow your practice, promote the use of your services, and stand apart from competitors.

5. Client retention and loyalty
Although practices are very busy these days, studies show that pet parents do shop around for veterinary care. Care plans can be a cornerstone of your strategy to keep pet parents coming back to your practice year after year. Pet parents appreciate the education, customization, and peace of mind provided by care plans. Don’t wait to capture the business of these pet parents when times slow down. Help keep them coming back by enrolling pets in care plans that last throughout their entire lifespan.

Covetrus® CarePlans is a flexible program designed to help more pets get care, give pet parents choices, and empower veterinarians with robust tools and analytics to propel practice growth. You can provide your clients with a complete wellness solution that combines software and professional services to make managing a complete care program easy.

Visit Covetrus CarePlans to learn more.

¹Lajumoke, Tara, “3 Strategies for Making the Most of the Subscription Economy,” Harvard Business Review, March 31, 2022. https://hbr.org/sponsored/2022/03/3-strategies-for-making-the-most-of-the-subscription-economy.

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

³Industry Trends and Stats, American Pet Products Association, 2024. https://americanpetproducts.org/industry-trends-and-stats

⁴Gilmartin, Sheri; Zirkle, Kate, “Upon Final Analysis: Price increases drove the veterinary industry in 2022, but what about this year?,” Today’s Veterinary Business, April 1, 2023. https://todaysveterinarybusiness.com/veterinary-industry-pet-owners-0423/.

⁵Why Wellness? [white paper], Covetrus/VCP, August 2020.