21 Aug 2015
Mark Colton
Job Title
IMAGE: ©Benjamin Simon/iStock.
In the past, a successful veterinary practice would expect to generate around 25 per cent of its gross revenue from product sales, but things have changed and practices can no longer depend on maintaining margins on this sales revenue.
The percentage of revenue coming from your professional services has to increase and that’s a good thing. None of your competitors for supplying products can offer services that depend on veterinary qualifications and experience. Your only competitors are other veterinary surgeons.
The bad news is you need to replace the “lost” revenue by providing more billable services from the same number of providers. Basically, you have to be more effective in making staff time as productive as possible.
The goal is to help your vets focus on billable work, avoiding distractions and not performing jobs that can be done by support staff.
Other professionals, such as lawyers and dentists, routinely delegate tasks that don’t require specialist knowledge or regulatory approval. For example, your nurses can record vital signs and presenting notes prior to clients seeing a vet, allowing each vet two active consulting rooms.
Also, tasks such as booster vaccinations could be done by a VN providing you conform to RCVS guidelines – freeing up vets’ time for other treatments.
How much time do you feel is wasted when a client calls to check on whether a prescription can be refilled? The prescription process can often be casual and jumbled. It may involve a receptionist seeking out a vet to look up a patient’s record, then dispense the medication or ask the client to bring the patient in again.
A tool such as RxWorks’ Prescription Manager would enable you to:
With Prescription Manager, if a prescription is exhausted or expired, the receptionist can advise a client that the vet will need to see the patient again before further medication is given. The receptionist can offer to make an appointment on the spot without referring to the vet.
Keeping track of messages between staff can be a real hassle. You cannot guarantee the intended recipient actually gets the message and when they do, that they can see any prior communications relating to the topic. If the topic involves a client or patient, do they have easy and quick access to their details?
You can get over this by using your PMS as long as it has something similar to RxWorks’ internal messaging system. Messages can be logged and recorded with an indication of their urgency. You can look at the total “thread” of messages on a topic – who sent them, who received them, their reply and so on. If the messages concern a client or patient, their records are linked to the thread and can be directly accessed.
Typically, there are two components of any project aimed at increasing the amount of productive time available to vets and VNs: delegation of appropriate tasks to trained and trusted support staff; and automating administrative processes that can eat into time available for billable work.
Both tasks require you to spend time up-front, training and setting up the necessary processes. But, the outcome can bring you increased revenue with higher and controllable margins.
