Improving Routine Wellness Testing

Armed with my DVM degree and a master’s in public health, I started my veterinary clinical career in general practice with enthusiasm and lofty goals. I have always been keen to promote wellness and routine testing for dogs and cats as part of their annual evaluation. Our pets have shorter lifespans than humans and each calendar year ages them disproportionally faster. Seeing a patient each year is equivalent to evaluating his physiological health every 7 years.

Fast forward 15 years, the issue is still contemporary. Why is it so hard to convince pet owners who adore their pets to do preventive testing? And how can we be more successful with our recommendations?

First, let’s review the benefits of wellness testing.

Medical benefits:

• Confirmation of health when results come back normal.
• Provides baselines values for the individual patient, which is valuable should he come in sick later in the year.
• May alert to subclinical diseases, such as thyroid issues, diabetes, renal or kidney insufficiency, parasitic or other infections that are not causing overt disease yet.
• Identification of worrying trends from one year to the next.
• When we catch diseases early, we can treat them with better success, limit damage to the organ in question or other internal organs, that otherwise would be stressed by the disease condition.

Financial benefits:

• It costs less to treat a pet when it is early in the disease process than when the condition is established.
• Delayed diagnosis of chronic conditions may lead to costly emergency visits and financial and emotional costs.
• The financial benefits are not only for the owner of the pet but also for the clinic and the staff. Increased revenues and increased job satisfaction help create better employee retention due to a higher level of patient care.

With all these benefits, why aren’t we more successful at convincing pet owners with our recommendations? According to Life Learn Animal Health’s website¹, here are the top reasons why pet owners don’t comply:

• They don’t remember. Either they don’t remember the recommendation itself or they don’t remember they had to act upon it.
• They don’t understand. Are they confused or uncertain? They may have gotten conflicting recommendations from the clinic staff or maybe too much medical jargon was used.
• They don’t perceive the value of the service. The explanation may have been rushed or was not supported by additional material.
• They only see short-term costs and don’t see the long-term benefits.
• They simply did not jive with the healthcare team.

Here are some tips on how to improve your odds of success:

Tip #1: Communication

Half of the reasons why clients don’t comply stem from communication issues. To communicate the value of wellness testing, review all medical and financial benefits of wellness testing and make sure the communication is clear and free of medical jargon. Ask open-ended questions to flush out any misunderstanding.

According to a study² published by the AVMA, clients who receive a clear recommendation are seven times more likely to adhere to that recommendation.

Additionally:

• Make your interaction client focused. “What do you hope to achieve today?” will help you position your recommendation in a manner that aligns with the needs of the client.
• Pay attention to non-verbal cues. Expressing attentiveness through your facial expression, tone of voice, and movements during your client and patient interaction may influence client adherence to your recommendation.
• Speak in terms of benefit to the pet. Review how routine diagnostics benefits the patient. If pet owners mention price, acknowledge their concern, and redirect the conversation to both medical and financial advantages. Illustrate how costs now will save future expenses.

Given the time crunch in veterinary practices these days, discussing your recommendations may benefit from visual aids and dedicated client reports:

• Use visual aids — Illustrate your point. For routine bloodwork, having a laminated Wellie Report³ or CBC/ chemistry results may be a valuable resource to show the value of the service you recommend.
• The Wellie Report ³ from Ellie Diagnostics is a complimentary summary of the bloodwork with a health score that helps veterinarians and technicians have meaningful conversations with their clients. The Wellie Report is an industry-leading scorecard dedicated to pet owners. It comes free of charge with the rest of the bloodwork you send to Ellie Diagnostics. It is a concise, easy-to-read review of the lab results. It provides value for the money spent on routine bloodwork, which in turn makes it more likely for the pet owner to agree on diagnostics in the future. Not only does it help increase the revenue of the clinic, but it saves time for the clinic employees by providing a unique thoughtful touch to pet owners.

Tip #2: Administrative

At the practice level, there are 3 key areas where the practice manager can help improve client adherence to recommendations: appointment booking, practice-wide recommendations, and using social media as an educating and bonding tool for pet owners.

Appointment Booking

Among the reasons why clients don’t follow recommendations, forgetting is a common one. Clients may have forgotten the recommendation itself or they may have forgotten to act upon it.

Pet owners lead busy lives and may forget to book an appointment for their pets. Reminder systems have greatly improved in the last 10 years and automatic postcards, or text messaging reminders are now available on management software for veterinary clinics. Scheduling the next visit before checking out from the current visit, also called forward booking, is a powerful tool to secure the next appointment for a patient and is becoming more commonplace in veterinary practices.

Clinic-wide Recommendations

Another reason why pet parents don’t follow directions is because they received conflicting information from the clinic staff. The messaging around wellness bloodwork needs to be clear and consistent among the clinic staff to ensure success and instill client confidence. The last thing you want is information across your team that contradicts each other.

Try promoting and revisiting the clinic-wide recommendations on routine wellness at staff meetings. Review what works and what doesn’t. Keep track of results and/or set a practice-wide goal of increasing client compliance.

Utilize Social Media

Educate your clients on routine wellness on your website or social media platforms. Use social media to advertise success stories: long term health, subclinical disease caught in time, and treated or managed successfully.

Engage clients and make them part of your practice: share pictures of their pets (with their approval of course). This will bond them to your practice, which, in turn, improves compliance.

Tip #3: Pricing Strategies

You can do all the right things and still get dismal compliance if your pricing strategy is inappropriate. Wellness testing should be priced at a price point where benefits outweigh price burden. Working with the right diagnostic provider can be the difference for successful implementation of routine wellness testing in your clinic.

Ellie Diagnostics is a full-service veterinary wellness and diagnostics laboratory dedicated to transforming animal health by making wellness testing more accessible. At Ellie, we believe wellness bloodwork is essential, and should be standard and attainable for every pet, every year.

Feel free to book a free consultation with one of our diagnostic experts on our website to discuss your options.

References

1 - Life Learn Animal Health website https://www.lifelearn.com/2016/06/30/7-reasons-that-clients-arent-complying-with-your-recommendations/ accessed Oct. 16, 2023

2 - Kanji N et al “Effect of veterinarian-client-patient interactions on client adherence to dentistry and surgery recommendations in companion animal practice” JAVMA 240.4 (2012); 427-436 https://avmajournals.avma.org/view/journals/javma/240/4/javma.240.4.427.xml Accessed Oct. 16, 2023

3 - Wellie Report https://www.elliediagnostics.com/en/industry-leading-wellie-report

Ariane Kaplan DVM, MPH

Dr. Kaplan earned her DVM and master’s in public health from Tufts University in Massachusetts, followed by a small animal rotating internship at VCA in Phoenix, Arizona.

She practiced small animal medicine and emergency medicine before becoming a Diagnostics Professional Services Veterinarian 6 years ago. She is currently the Director of Veterinary Relations at Ellie Diagnostics.

In her free time, she consults with her 4 misfit cats on good manners and how to live together in harmony.