Sep 29, 2020, 6:35 PM
As professionals in the industry, our livelihood is based on prevention. Better preventive care products and services lead to healthier practices and patients. Given that prevention has many moving parts, attention to detail is critical, which is why we ensure every patient is offered comprehensive preventive care. It allows us to maximize welfare and optimize practice health. In order to achieve this, it is imperative to develop a program for your practice and track its progress. Through this system, you can achieve maximum client compliance while simultaneously offering attention to detail. Similar to anything that requires meticulous detailing, planning, and organization, it is a must to ensure that the process is conducted in the right manner.
Program Building
As with any medical program, a successful program will not only include the exams and vaccine study, but it will also represent your practice’s philosophy on wellness. Start by building a menu of the products and services to meet each patient’s needs, followed by grouping them based on their basic information such as the species, breed, age, and gender.
Different age groups will require different vaccines and lab work. Most vets will categorize their patients to six different parameters based on species and age (junior, adult, senior, or geriatric). Some might break it down further to gender, breed, lifestyle, spayed/neutered, etc. Each of these groups will be offered a different yearly preventive menu, including some or all of the options outlined below:
- Vaccines
- Bloodwork
- Physical examination
- Clinical urine tests
- Blood pressure
- Electrocardiography
- Stool test
- Microchip
- Sterilization
- Dentistry
- Parasite prevention products
- Radiography
Set Goals
Every package might be provided by your program in annual packages consistent with the current age of your patients. These can further be correlated with a lower price for optimal adoption or not, depending on the pricing philosophy of your practice. One approach would be to follow the SMART methodology’s principles. For that, you need to be specific about your goals, set goals that allow progress to be tracked, and set goals that are attainable, given the current numbers.
You need to understand what percentage of your patients are following your current prevention program. Additionally, you also have to work towards understanding the percentage you are aiming at and where you would like to see these numbers after a specific period. While this may appear to be easy, the real challenge vets often face is measuring their existing program’s adoption rate. The easiest way to understand this is by dividing each basic preventive item billed over the last year by the number of patients.
The end goal is to improve the number of preventive veterinary products and services bought annually, including lab diagnostics. These should be conducted in line with your plan to ensure all your patients receive the preventive health care that they truly deserve and to lower the number of preventable diseases diagnosed significantly.
In order for your prevention plan to succeed, it is vital to check whether your goals are being met or not. Here’s what you should understand:
- What percentage of your patients have met the preventive expectations of their bundled plan?
- What percentage has opted for each item?
- What percentage has opted for each bundled package?
- How much percentage of your patients are lapsing concerning their prevention plan?
- If you are offering a wellness program, you need to check how many patients are meeting their prevention plan’s goal as opposed to those who are not part of the program.
- Understand the number of patients suffering from a preventable disease.
A robust practice management software product is a must as it allows you to easily track these metrics and have a better understanding of the reports. While some will have a built-in reporting system, others would require you to customize it yourself.
Get the Team Involved
Now that you have created the program, you need to communicate it to your staff and ensure they are on board with you. To deliver an optimum result, make tracking your progress a team effort by including a few entertainment options such as:
- Use a large wall to keep track of the number of patients who have used the program for the year.
- Include any items that are perhaps missing or lagging on the board.
- Train your staff to offer presentations on preventive care while checking the temperature, pulse, and respiration of their patient.
- Create a prize for the one with the best presentation.
- Offer incentives for achieving milestones.