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Deliver quality care for pets while growing practice revenues by integrating wellness plans into your practice
Proactive pet care is a growing trend, influenced by the rise in pet parents—especially Millennial and Gen Z parents who don’t mind spending on their fur babies—and technology that empowers personalized services and flexible payments.
Wellness plans are increasingly attractive for clients because scheduled payments can happen in the background. The flow-on effect for veterinary practices is long-term patient-veterinarian relationships based on meaningful recommendations and a steady flow of income.
Here are some key reasons you should be thinking about integrating wellness plans from your software into your workflow.
What should wellness plans accomplish? They should encourage regular visits to you, the veterinarian. With appropriately planned care over a patient’s lifetime, you can provide services that lead to healthier pets with an improved quality of life.
When you see patients on a regular basis, serious illnesses and conditions can be caught and treated earlier. These plans also attract clients and their pets all year long, even during your slowest months, which amounts to improved care, increased customer loyalty, and more revenue.
Most clients love their pets, but not all clients love the expenses that pets can entail. There are few worse situations than clients who suffer from “sticker shock” at checkout. Clients never want to feel as though they can’t care for their pets due to the expense.
One way to offset care expenses is for your practice to offer service bundles that divide the cost of the plan into equal monthly payments. The option to invest in service bundles offers added value for your clients without blowing their budgets. This is especially so if they include discounts on other veterinary treatments not covered by the plan. Being able to plan for a fixed regular payment takes the stress out of their veterinary services spend without compromising care.
Wellness plans can help clients save even more money if issues are picked up during regular exams. Early diagnosis and treatment of health problems are usually less expensive and less distressing for both client and patient. With a wellness treatment plan in place, clients are more likely to schedule check-ups and treatments they might not have booked otherwise. This means that patients receive a higher level of health maintenance and enjoy an enhanced quality of life.
How can wellness plans help your practice from a revenue perspective? Having fixed regular payments coming into your practice from wellness plans can help you manage cash flow and financial planning. By offering plans at a fixed monthly rate, you position care as an affordable option for clients, so they can keep necessary care going without having the dreaded cost conversation. You provide regular, consistent care for your patients while driving consistent revenue for your practice.
When purchasing wellness plans, your clients have essentially budgeted and paid for their pets’ wellness program in advance. As wellness plan clients come in, you can even promote specials specifically for them, such as a certain percentage off retail products. This provides clients with extra incentive to purchase additional items, as well as promote the wellness offering to those who haven’t taken advantage of it yet.
Another way wellness plans will benefit your practice is by differentiating your practice from others in the area. Wellness plans show that you are focused on the long-term care of your patients and clients and making it affordable. You can use that as a positioning tool to market your practice and grow your client base.
These plans will let you provide excellent long-term care for existing and new patients.
Wellness treatment plans also promote ongoing contact with the reception team and veterinary professionals. This helps strengthen relationships with clients (and pets) while providing long-term, preventative health services, and ensures your practice can deliver the best possible standards of care.
Regular communication with clients also helps personalize their engagement with your practice, so care and service reminders are less likely to be ignored.
Initial set-up and ongoing administration of wellness plans can appear daunting for some practice managers and offering a regular payment plan for specified services can hit operational obstacles. Without the tools to set up plans, check payments, and schedule follow-up appointments, the idea of wellness plans may get shelved and forgotten in the flurry of patient visits.
The right software can take the pain out of creating and maintaining wellness treatment plans and help simplify and automate the process. Covetrus® Pulse®, Impromed®, and Avimark® offer wellness plans that allow you to bundle different services together. Once set up, your software helps you to manage these plans by collecting regular payments and managing appointments throughout the year. This helps smooth out revenue dips and stabilize cash flow for your practice.
Software solutions, like Pulse, Impromed, and Avimark, also help you to stay on top of clinic tasks like recurring product purchases with reminder prompts for items like flea and tick treatments. Veterinarians can be confident that they have inventory on hand when their patients need it.
By implementing wellness plans, you create a win-win-win for your patients, your clients, and your practice. Patients get the care they need and clients have a better experience because pet healthcare becomes easy and affordable. Your practice benefits from a steady revenue stream and differentiation from competitors.
With a consistent wellness plan, veterinary practices can lead the trend in proactive healthcare and create client peace of mind that their pets are receiving the best healthcare from their preferred provider.