Stronger together: Vale Park Animal Hospital and vRxPro®

Dr. Brent Lakia has led Vale Park Animal Hospital since 1998. Today it’s one of the busiest practices in the Chicago-area market, with eight doctors, 12 exam rooms, a surgeon on staff every day, and four to five providers on the floor at any given time.

For all that momentum, one obstacle nearly derailed practice growth: Dr. Lakia’s concerns about offering an online pharmacy.

His skepticism dated back to the first wave of veterinary e-commerce platforms in the mid-2000s. The technology felt clunky and unfamiliar, pricing was confusing, and nobody could keep passwords straight.

But the main reason Dr. Lakia walked away was a hesitation he still recognizes in his colleagues today: No one wants to be one of those practices that bombards clients with promotional emails.

Dr. Lakia paid a price for his reluctance, even if it wasn’t obvious at first. Over the years, as third-party retailers grew more aggressive, prescription transfer requests became more frequent. Soon, faxes, phone calls, and emails started piling up that all needed to be sorted before anyone could get to a patient.

“You spend half your morning just trying to filter through the faxes and emails you got the night before. It takes a ton of staff time, a ton of doctor time — and takes time away from seeing patients and clients.”

— Dr. Brent Lakia, Vale Park Animal Hospital

Every one of those requests also represented in-clinic pharmacy revenue leaving the practice. Clients seeking online convenience or lower prices were filling prescriptions elsewhere instead of through Vale Park — a loss the practice wasn’t tracking closely enough to see clearly at the time.

On top of the competitive pressure, Vale Park was running up against a natural ceiling. With a fixed number of doctors and exam rooms, there’s only so much in-clinic pharmacy revenue a veterinary practice can generate, no matter how well the team performs.

If Vale Park wanted to grow, something had to change. For Dr. Lakia, that meant accepting that showing up for clients online was just as personal as showing up for them in the exam room.

Dr. Lakia’s hesitation had always come from a protective place: He didn’t want Vale Park to feel like every other business blasting out promotions. But watching his own clients — the ones who trusted him with the hardest conversations in the exam room — he started to see it differently.

“Our clients rely on us to meet them where they are — whether that’s a hard conversation about a sick pet, or something as simple as how they want to pay for a prescription.”

— Dr. Brent Lakia, Vale Park Animal Hospital

Protecting that relationship, it turned out, didn’t mean keeping everything inside the building. It meant showing up wherever his clients actually needed him.

The ever-growing mountain of prescription transfer requests told him clients were already buying online. Stepping up to offer an online pharmacy option was just another way of providing excellent client and patient care.

By 2021, Dr. Lakia committed to going all-in on Covetrus vRxPro. Part of what made that possible was how far the technology itself had come.

Gone were the unpredictable systems he remembered from the mid-2000s that left him uneasy about even logging in. Instead, vRxPro offers a simple, intuitive solution that makes everything easier for prescribers, office staff, and clients.

“The interface is great,” says Dr. Lakia. “I can find what I need in two seconds. It’s user-friendly, it’s easy to interpret, and it links right off of our website.”

Trusting the tech made the next important step doable. Because Dr. Lakia no longer felt he had to hover over every detail, he felt comfortable handing ownership of the vRxPro online pharmacy rollout to a team member who was looking to grow.

“You have to make a decision, then you have to let somebody else do it,” Dr. Lakia says. “If I’d tried to run this myself, as the owner, it never would have happened.”

Dr. Lakia tapped his inventory manager — someone who already worked closely with distributors and was looking for the chance to lead something of her own. She ran with it, and Dr. Lakia hasn’t had to drive it since. Letting go also encouraged Dr. Lakia to truly lean into everything vRxPro has to offer. That’s when he realized just how much partnering with Covetrus gives back to the practice.

Vale Park doesn’t manage a marketing function or build promotional campaigns. They don’t monitor competitor pricing or negotiate with manufacturers to stay price-competitive. They handed that work to Covetrus and let the platform run.

“You advertise for us. You email for us. You do the marketing, you do the sales, and you keep us competitive. Our clients would rather support us anyway — as long as we’re competitive. That’s what you give us.”

— Dr. Brent Lakia, Vale Park Animal Hospital

That last point matters more than it might seem. Clients, by and large, want to buy from their veterinarian. They trust the practice and value the relationship. What had been sending them to third-party retailers wasn’t a lack of loyalty, but a lack of convenience and price competitiveness. vRxPro removed both barriers.

If Dr. Lakia had any lingering fears that his clients would feel put off by marketing emails, one text from his mother dispelled them for good.

When a promotional email from vRxPro landed in his mother’s inbox offering 40% off heartworm prevention for her dog, she texted her son to ask whether she could order through Vale Park’s online store… and if that purchase would still support the practice.

“I knew it worked when my mom texted me. Once I knew even she was scrolling through this, I knew my clients were too. And I started hearing it in the exam room: ‘I keep my eyes peeled for the next coupon.’”

— Dr. Brent Lakia, Vale Park Animal Hospital

That moment reframed everything for Dr. Lakia: The promotions Covetrus was sending on Vale Park’s behalf weren’t a bother, but a benefit. If his mother was reading and acting on those emails, then clients across every generation would find them valuable, too.

To get the most out of their partnership with Covetrus, Vale Park dedicated the first year with vRxPro to spreading the word about the practice’s new online storefront.

The team worked through their client list systematically via phone calls, texts, and direct links to the store, all built around a simple pitch: We have the products you want, at competitive prices, from the people who already know your pet.

“Our team could whip through those calls in 10 minutes some mornings,” Dr. Lakia recalls. “They knew the pinch points for clients and got them set up fast — to the point where they could just text someone a link and be done.”

In-clinic interactions are key opportunities, too. When someone mentions they’ve been ordering from a third party, the team simply points them to the practice’s own online store and shares their pitch. The transition is almost always immediate, says Dr. Lakia. And it requires no hard sell.

The best part: Those efforts paid off even faster than the practice expected. It only took about four to six weeks from onboarding for Vale Park to start seeing success with their storefront.

The most important result during that first year with vRxPro was one Dr. Lakia didn’t see coming: In-clinic pharmacy revenue didn’t decline as he feared it would. It kept growing along the same trajectory it always had.

vRxPro simply added an entirely new revenue stream on top of it — roughly an additional 50% on top of what the in-clinic pharmacy was generating. It was the revenue the practice had been losing without ever fully realizing it.

The sustained growth vRxPro enabled changed the practice’s whole revenue equation.

Dr. Lakia explains it this way: Once a practice is running near capacity, growing in-clinic pharmacy revenue by even a small fraction requires more of something, whether that’s staff, doctor hours, or physical space.

By Dr. Lakia’s estimate, for every dollar of in-clinic pharmacy revenue the practice generates, vRxPro adds approximately 50 cents more, without those expenditures. The only thing the practice needs to do is bring clients to their online store once.

“If I wanted to increase revenue by that much in-house? It just isn’t feasible. But we’re able to do that by converting our clients to our online store just once — and then I don’t have to do it anymore.”

— Dr. Brent Lakia, Vale Park Animal Hospital

The growth has continued year after year. Vale Park now tracks roughly 11% year-over-year growth through vRxPro — a figure that shows up consistently in their weekly Covetrus performance updates. The online channel keeps climbing even as the in-clinic channel holds steady.

The workflow impact has been equally meaningful. After a year of having clients move over from third-party pharmacies to Vale Park’s own online store, prescription transfer requests dropped dramatically. The pharmacy team could get through their daily tasks in a fraction of the time, freeing everyone in the practice to focus on what they do best: caring for patients.2

Vale Park doesn’t try to stock everything in-clinic. The practice maintains a deliberately curated formulary of the medications the team recommends most and that clients prefer to take home that day. Their Covetrus-powered online store fills the rest, giving clients access to a larger selection without requiring the practice to warehouse inventory it might not turn.

This complementary approach sends a clear message: Whether a client is checking out at the front desk after an appointment or ordering from home at midnight, the practice is the right place to buy.

There’s a business case here, too. Buying groups and manufacturer rebate programs reward volume across a broader set of products. The online store helps Vale Park meet those thresholds even for medications it doesn’t stock in the clinic.

The storefront also reinforces the practice’s brand rather than diluting it. Integrated directly with the practice’s own website, it gives clients the same clean, professional experience whether they’re checking out at the front desk or ordering from their phone.

For practice owners debating whether to add an online store, a common question is, “Does an online pharmacy cannibalize in-clinic sales?” Dr. Lakia’s response, based on five years of real data, is direct: That’s not how it works.

“You discover how many clients were looking for the opportunity to buy online. It’s not about competitors versus you — it’s about people wanting to buy a certain way. Give them the opportunity, and you’ll find out how much you were losing to the other guy.”

— Dr. Brent Lakia, Vale Park Animal Hospital

In-clinic revenue at Vale Park has grown since launching vRxPro. The two channels didn’t split one pool of revenue; they expanded it. Dr. Lakia also points out that even in a scenario where in-clinic revenue held flat, the math would still add up to more total pharmacy revenue than before.0

Evolution is a part of every industry. But no matter what happens within the online pharmacy space, Dr. Lakia is confident in the principle that guided his decision to partner with Covetrus: Stay focused on the client relationship, however it’s best served.

• Vale Park Animal Hospital’s in-clinic pharmacy revenue grew even after adding Covetrus vRxPro, with the online store adding roughly 50% more revenue on top of it. These two channels complement each other — they don’t compete.
• There is a ceiling on in-clinic growth, and most busy practices have hit it. An online pharmacy helps lift that ceiling without adding a single staff member or square foot of space.
• Your clients want to buy from you. When the price is right and the experience is easy, they choose their local veterinarian. vRxPro makes that decision simple.
• Covetrus handles the marketing so your team doesn’t have to. Promotional campaigns, competitive pricing, and platform management are all included.
• Bringing customers over is a one-time effort. Once a client is set up in your online store, their ongoing purchases come to you naturally — with no faxes, no chasing, and no lost prescriptions.
• The return comes quickly. Vale Park saw meaningful revenue within weeks of launching, and it has grown consistently ever since.

vRxPro is Covetrus’s online pharmacy solution, built for veterinary practices. It delivers price-competitive products, automated client outreach, and a convenient digital storefront built to help recapture revenue from third-party retailers and keep more prescriptions in-house.

Ready to see what’s possible with vRxPro? Request a demo below!