Introduction

The veterinary industry has been going through a consolidation and corporatization trend for the last few years. Larger players are buying up smaller players who in turn are buying smaller clinics. This blog shows how corporations can attract more clinics and help them grow, and also increasing corporate revenues by using a state-of-the-art, cloud-based practice management software.

Win Win

It is getting increasingly challenging for individual full-service clinics to stay profitable with corporate pharmacies like Costco offering cheaper medications, spay/neuter clinics offering inexpensive procedures, non-anesthesia based dental cleaning offering low cost options within rented space inside pet supply stores.

Smaller clinics are more and more tempted to sell to larger corporations and ‘cash-out’ after years of hard work. These corporations are able to provide top price and on-going marketing muscle to help acquired clinics. It seems like a win-win.

How to attract clinics to your corporate group

The corporate groups are all trying to attract clinics from the same pool. How would a clinic looking to sell select a corporation to sell to ?

Better price, better management, more room for autonomy and more marketing help in growth.

Role of PIM

The next best thing besides excellent patient care, is the Practice Management software – the heartbeat of any clinic.

For years the industry has been dominated with server-based software. As functionality needs increased to connect with clients, additional add-on 3rd party software’s had to be added to the server based PIMs. Soon, the cost and complexity of practice management grew exponentially with added software’s for:

Client communication
Reminders
Treatment Flowsheets
Client Portal
Referral Management
Dental Charting
Image Editing
Remote connectivity software
Backup and server management services
Key Performance Indicator Dashboard reporting

Clinics, instead of focusing only on patient care, have had the need to be IT savvy to manage all the above. It is expensive, time-consuming and makes it challenging to get a single view of the patient. Workflow in the clinic slows down, patient care suffers, and clinics are not able to grow with so much software weighing around their ankles.

This is where a good cloud-based practice management software comes into play.

How to attract clinics and grow a hospital group

Attract clinics with an easy and fully inclusive practice management platform to help them grow. Along the same lines, corporations can bank on a software that gives visibility across the whole hospital chain. Providing insight into areas of improvement, and cross-clinic learning opportunities is a huge value add. To be able to see key performance indicators helps manage clinics better.

It makes it a lot easier to implement if most of the features are already incorporated within the software itself instead of having to integrate multiple other software’s adding integration challenges and added cost.

Onward Vet provides all of this in one combined easy to use package.

This helps individual clinics, and hospital groups grow and scale up.

The above Onward Vet Dashboard shows the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on top.

Below the KPIs, it shows the sales trend per clinic and the top selling procedures.

The geographical report shows where most of the business is coming from and where there are areas of opportunity for marketing. This graph can be zoomed in at the Zip Code level as well.

There is also a Workflow Efficiency report, by Hospital, that shows where in the Patient Visit process the most time is spent. Waiting for check-in, room, doctor, Rx and check-out. More resources/focus can be added to those time consuming areas. Faster patient visits result in happier clients who come back and spread the good word about your clinic. You are able to see more patients in the same amount of time, hence increasing your revenues.