Welcome back to the Sikka Podcast! Here at Sikka we are passionate about bringing you tools and solutions that benefit your patients AND your practice. We have talked about some key metrics and features that you should pay extra attention to as a retail healthcare owner in the past few episodes. Today, we would like to focus on veterinary practices management specifically. We will walk you through 3 critical metrics or benchmarks for veterinarians, in order to help veterinary teams better monitor their practices and identify areas of strength and opportunities to grow.
Average Charge per Pet
The average charge per pet is a measure of the cost to the client for each pet treated. This metric is normally calculated by month, which tells you how much you are likely to make from each pet for a given month. You can change the date range to see short-term trends (like a trend for a quarter or half year) and long-term trends (like a trend for whole year and last three or five years) on our Sikka Practice Optimizer Application. This metric reflects how active your patient pool is every month and whether you’re effectively promoting your service or products. For example, if you see a downward trend in Average Charge per Pet for the last three months, you may want to check
- Number One:. Whether there is a sharp increase in no-shows or appointment cancellations
- Number Two: Whether you proposed comprehensive physical check-ups to the clients that did not show up regularly.
- Number Three: Whether you suggested to conduct diagnostic tests when you found certain symptoms through a check-up that may affect a pet’s health.
New patients and Clients
While retaining an existing client is important, you should always pay attention to the growth of your new patients. The life expectancy of a pet is a lot shorter than a human being, which means the animal patients’ marketing life cycle is shorter too. Therefore, you need to keep acquiring more new patients to ensure your profitability in long term, and make sure to track the number so that you getting closer to the goals you set. Sikka Practice Optimizer’s New Patients KPI allows you to track the number of your new patients each month. It also compares the actual numbers with the goals you set for each month thru a bar chart, and mark the months that fail to have enough new patients in. You can also export the monthly new patients list by clicking the bars. We suggest you share the list with your team in monthly meetings, and try to brainstorm on innovative marketing campaigns or offers for the patients on the lists. The efforts could be monthly follow-up calls, e-mail promotions, or surveys. A little extra work may reward you with lot of more revenue.
Current Fees and New Fees
Keeping up with the market trend is important too, especially the trend of fee scheduling. You don’t want to undercharge or overcharge. Doing either won’t make your business successful. That’s why we strongly suggest you keep an eye on the Sikka Fee Optimizer tool. The tool leverages Sikka’s 13 years of experience and vast database to provide fee benchmarks to veterinarians. By tabulating the average procedure fees and cross-referencing comparable local practices via zip codes, each fee schedule is tailored to provide you with the most competitive fee recommendations for every single procedure you offer. Pay attention to the Current Fees and New fees columns, the indexes indicating how much you currently charge and the how much is recommended to charge. You can also clearly see the potential adjusted production estimated by the tool if you change your current fee schedule. The recommendations help you stay competitive without foregoing revenue and allow you to spend the time and money you would normally spend researching and subscribing to multiple reports on improving your patient care instead.
Thanks for tuning into the Sikka Software podcast, where we give you tips and strategies to benefit your patients and improve your practice. Until next time.