Spotlight on wellness: Are annual plans the answer?
Most of you aren't implementing annual wellness plans, but clients are asking for them. What gives?
Discounts on services. Monthly payments. The minimum level of veterinary health care. For some practice owners, these are phrases to be feared. They open a Pandora's box of worries about falling revenue and the perceived value of veterinary services. After all, if you can discount your fees, weren't they too high to begin with?
But monthly payments and regular discounts are part of life at Dr. Karl Salzsieder's practice Yelm Veterinary Hospital in Yelm, Wash. They're added benefits of a wellness plan in which clients pay for a year's worth of physical exams, wellness testing, radiographs, and more.
Does a plan like this make team members and veterinarians look less like medical personnel and more like used-car salesmen, hawking annual wellness plans like extended warranties on electronics? Dr. Salzsieder's hospital director, Lyn Mitchell, wondered the same thing five years ago when the plan was first discussed.
"Doctors worried it would hurt their production levels, and they didn't like the selling aspect," Mitchell says. "But we've never sold it hard. We didn't actively promote it. It's just a way for clients to make payments on what we consider the best care for pets without us having the headache of billing."
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Big benefit to the smallest pets
Keep your promotion subtle
"Our doctors and team members are instructed not to 'sell' the wellness plans," Dr. Karl Salzsieder says. "Every client would think every time they came in they were getting hit with a sales pitch." Instead, posters and brochures explaining the plan appear in exam rooms, and team members and doctors explain the plan when clients ask. Dr. Salzsieder says they even had to tone down one receptionist's zeal for offering the wellness plan to clients. "She was making $300 to $400 a month in employee bonuses for signing up people for the plan," he says. Dr. Salzsieder talked to her and found out she was just a natural salesperson and in love with the plan. "She used it herself. She loved that people could take advantage of free office visits," he says. She toned down her mentions of the plan to clients, but Dr. Salzsieder didn't temper her enthusiasm.
It probably won't surprise you that most clinics don't offer a plan like Dr. Salzsieder's. Only one out of every 20 veterinarians told us their practice offers a wellness plan that bundles common services and is paid in monthly installments.
Strangely enough, this is at a time when pet owners say they want this type of wellness program, as evidenced by the recent Bayer Veterinary Care Usage Study. A "wellness plan billed monthly" was the second-most-popular choice for what veterinarians could do to get pet owners to take their pet to the clinic more often.
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Big benefit to the smallest pets
Big benefit to the smallest pets
Dr. Karl Salzsieder was inspired to start the annual wellness plan in part because of pet owners who were scared away from the care necessary for some of the most vulnerable pets: puppies and kittens.
"We wanted to encourage compliance with our recommendations for frequent visits, spays and neuters, and vaccinations," Dr. Salzsieder says. "But some new pet owners seemed to experience sticker shock after the first visit and wouldn't finish their vaccination series. The office-call barrier was too much."
Dr. Salzsieder says the annual wellness plan is a client education tool as much as a tool to help clients spread out payments and encourage them to come in. "We're telling the owner this is what our veterinarians recommend you need every year," he says. "Do this, and you're doing the necessary minimum."
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