1 Aug 2024
The route to running your practice efficiently while increasing profitability could be right at your fingertips. Practice management systems can often be overlooked but, in the right hands, they have the potential to transform your business…
Tony Houghton
Job Title
Image © iStock.com / Andrey Suslov
If you were asked to name your practice’s best business assets, what would you say? Perhaps you’d describe the range of labour-saving equipment in your clinic, or the new facilities that have expanded the range of services you can offer clients.
It may surprise you to learn that one of your most valuable and profit-making tools is your practice management system (PMS), yet this key component in business success is often overlooked.
Gone are the days when veterinary software is merely a replacement for a pen-and-paper booking system. Too often, a PMS is left to quietly tick away in the background performing simple administrative functions. But it is no longer a silent partner, it has an indispensable, active role in the running of your practice.
A practice management system today should enhance efficiency, increase profitability, and improve both staff and client satisfaction. In fact, evidence suggests that businesses that use customer analytics – such as those acquired through PMS reports – are 19 times more likely to outperform competitors in profitability.
Whether you are setting up a new practice for the first time, or are already established, choosing a smart practice management system can be key to your overall success. Practice software should be a highly configurable system, so that it works in exactly the way you do, not the other way around. Let’s take a closer look at how a PMS can support your practice to best advantage.
The focus on improving the client journey has increased dramatically in recent years. Making sure clients have an experience worth recommending is a lot easier with the help of a reliable PMS. Parameters such as waiting times can be measured and can flag where additional support on the rota is required during busy periods.
Clients also want updates on their pets quickly, particularly if they are inpatients. Your PMS will make it easy to search through patient files to find required information such as test results, clinical notes and account updates.
We all know that effective communication is the backbone to any successful practice; there’s nothing more frustrating, for both the practice and the client, than missed appointments or misunderstood post-op instructions.
Traditionally, these communications have relied on verbal discussion, but this allows room for both human error and simply forgetting to relay important information. A PMS system can take the pressure off by making client communication and appointment reminders automatic with any mix of letter, email or SMS text message. Your clients receive the information they need easily and clearly, therefore improving compliance, and “no shows” can be significantly reduced.
Of course, not all veterinary care takes place inside a practice, and working as an ambulatory vet brings its own unique challenges. Thankfully, cloud-based technology can now deliver the advantages of in-house veterinary software to you on the road. There’s no need to rely on scribbled location instructions to make your way to a client – directions can be added to a client’s file, and, to make the wait less stressful, clients can be updated straightaway with your latest estimated time of arrival.
Image © iStock.com / Tetiana Garkusha
A day in practice is rarely without its pressures, but an efficient PMS will ultimately save you and your team time – arguably our most precious commodity.
In our ever-increasing digital world, it’s now a necessity to be able to reliably access information wherever we are, and that should include patient records and live data.
Cloud-based technology allows veterinary software to be accessible and backed-up continuously, so veterinary teams can get back to focusing on their patients and clients – this significantly reduces any ‘down time’. And once an estimate of charges has been created for a patient, it can be instantly converted to a client’s invoice. This is a huge time-saver for the veterinary team, and avoids chargeable items being accidentally left off the final account, protecting your bottom line.
Just as technology has eliminated the need for a manual appointment system, so too has it updated the process of stock control. Where we once had to devote hours of our time – sometimes entire days – to monitoring the proverbial stock cupboard, we can thankfully put our trusty PMS to use in this unavoidable task.
Yes, practice software can alleviate the manual business of tracking products and monitoring batch numbers, and it can also alert us when stock is close to its expiration date. Ordering can be completed with your main wholesaler through the PMS, and prices and stock levels can be automatically updated.
Not only can you ensure that stock levels are kept at appropriate numbers, but you also avoid money being wasted through discarding out-of-date products.
A large percentage of practices now offer additional options for clients such as pet health care plans and payments via insurance. This is often managed by a busy front-desk team, so it is vital that these processes are easy to set-up and oversee when time is short.
An efficient PMS will centralise all relevant information such as invoices, insurance and healthcare plan details, with the option to add notes to a client’s file to create an easily accessible communication trail. These features ensure that account transactions can be processed quickly, without the need to involve wider members of the team, as all required information is already attached to the client’s record.
As much as we aim to minimise debt, being a service industry means that we are vulnerable to non-paying customers. While these scenarios may sometimes be unavoidable, an increasing aged debt list doesn’t need to be. Managing these outstanding accounts will go a long way in obtaining the revenue which is rightfully yours.
Aged debt reports on your PMS should ideally be performed regularly as part of the standard cash and sales report process, and financial overviews can quickly identify any accounting errors. The front desk team may help with this process, as they will likely know the reason as to why an account hasn’t been paid immediately.
It’s a good idea to recover debt as quickly as possible, and often a friendly communication is all it takes. The PMS can help with this process, and ‘bad’ debtors can be flagged so that they are easily identifiable to users.
Image © wudu_8 / Adobe Stock
All veterinary practices collect data, and one of the more focused actions that practice software can perform is data analytics. It is an invaluable tool to improve profit margins and produce data-driven business insights and action points.
At your fingertips, your PMS can generate operational reports on your practice and can identify best sellers and loss leaders, customer acquisition and churn rate, as well as other key KPIs bespoke to your clinic such as the uptake of healthcare plans.
These insights can help to maximise marketing campaigns and ensure that you are making the best decisions for your practice and your team. We rely on evidence-based clinical treatment plans for our patients, so it makes sense to have the same approach to business. And you don’t need to be a financial guru to understand these reports, as data can be instantly extracted into Excel for your own analysis.
Without a smart PMS, it is easy to get lost in a sea of data analysis, but with this information streamlined, it can be a quick and uncomplicated process.
We’ve come a long way since the days of relying on pen and paper, and practice management systems have evolved to far more than just playing the part of a labour-saving device. The right veterinary software will have an indispensable role in every part of your clinical and business operations, saving time and ensuring that each team member can prioritise their focus on clients and patients.
By taking the time to integrate an efficient PMS into your practice, whether you are just setting up or already established in your local community, you will be investing the tools to grow and maintain your business with resilient processes and data-driven actions.
