Looking to grow your practice? All veterinary practices have five fundamental growth opportunities available to them – each of which can be accomplished utilizing the practice’s existing clients, patients and staff. You can:

1. Improve compliance
2. Increase the frequency of pet visits
3. Increase revenue per pet visit
4. Better manage reminders to ensure all current pets have future reminder requests
5. New client acquisition

In this month’s Practice Intelligence article, we’ll take a closer look at increasing pet visits. Growth in pet visit volume can be achieved by improving your practice’s performance in the following areas:

• A comprehensive reminder strategy
• Robust reminder requests for Recalls/Rechecks/Repurchases (R3)
• Semi-annual wellness visits

How much impact are we talking about? The benchmark average of visits per pet is 3.64 per year. Practices effectively executing in each of the above areas average 4.78 visits per pet per year. That’s more than one extra visit per active pet, per year!

Step 1: A comprehensive reminder strategy emphasizing both quantity and quality in your client communications.

First you’ll need to maximize the number of current pets WITH reminders – that’s the quantity. As reported in June’s Practice Intelligence article, on average only 74% of current pets have a future reminder scheduled for the upcoming 13 months.

Next, you must be sending out quality reminders – that is, ensuring that the reminders you send support your practice’s wellness standards of care. In other words, instead of just reminding on expiring vaccinations, you’re also reminding on annual wellness exams, intestinal parasite testing dental prophylaxis, early detection/wellness testing, and other core services and products in your wellness recommendations.

The last element of the formula comes from utilizing any and all communication channels available – this includes print, email and web (personalized pet owner education). By doing so, you are able to provide continuity and repetition of education customized to the client and pet. The ThinkPets client communications services perform all of these education methods.

The combined results of these three elements in the comprehensive reminder strategy are improved reminder response (increased visits) and compliance.

Step 2: Reminder Requests for Recalls, Rechecks and Repurchases (R3) which enforce your practice’s wellness program and allow you to better manage clinical situations, all while simultaneously generating incremental visits.

Where do these visits come from? To begin with, consistently request follow-up visits for chronic clinical situations and drug monitoring. A typical practice can miss 300-600 annual recheck/recall visits, simply by not reminding on them**.

For added impact you can, and should, also request re-purchases of consumable products (heartworm/flea preventives, pet food). In 2010, the percentage of practices requesting repurchases for the consumable items below showed ample room for improvement**:

• 77% of practices reminded for heartworm preventives
• 46% of practices reminded for flea/tick preventives
• <5% of practices reminded for pet food (including therapeutic diets)

Refer to the table below for recommended reminder intervals for consumer products:

Recall/Recheck/Repurchase (R3)

Service or Product	Reminder Intervals-Months
Recheck/Progress Physical Exam	As needed
Dental Prophylaxis	6/12
Dental Radiography	6/12/24
Ear Rechecks and Treatments	As Needed
Heartworm Preventives	3/6/12
Flea/Tick Preventives	3/4/6/12
Pet Food	As Needed
Dental Care Preventives	As Needed
Pharmaceutical Repurchase	As Needed
NSAID Repurchase	3/4/6
Miscellaneous Lab Tests	3/4/6/12/As Needed
Drug Monitoring Lab Tests	3/4/6/12/As Needed

Step 3: Introduction of semi-annual wellness visits. The majority of practices incorporating six month visits in their wellness programs include the following services and products:

• Semi-annual wellness exam
• Bordetella Vaccination (or other at risk non-core vaccinations)
• Intestinal Parasite Test (if adhering to CAPC recommendations)
• Heartworm Preventive Repurchase
• Dental Exam

This month’s Practice Intelligence webinar will further elaborate on the strategy to increase pet visits and provide practical implementation steps. The webinar is free of charge, click on the following to register:

Click here to Register for September’s Webinar

^* Best Practices performance from 64 ThinkPets practices and the comparative benchmark from 224 non-ThinkPets practices 2005 – 2010.

^** 288 practices in ThinkPets Reminder Database 2010