As a veterinary practice owner or manager, you don’t need us to tell you that running a vet clinic is a lot of work. Between caring for your animal patients, handling pet owners, keeping up with the latest in veterinary healthcare, ensuring your finances are in order, and scaling the business, non-urgent tasks like data collection and data analysis can fall through the cracks.
As busy as you might be, neglecting your database or your veterinary software is a mistake. Veterinary practice analytics are critical to the success of your business. The insights you can get from business data can improve all aspects of practice management and ownership — from scheduling and customer retention to marketing, inventory management, and, ultimately, your bottom line.
The key is knowing how to collect, analyze, and use data properly. If you don’t turn your raw numbers into actionable business intelligence, you risk drowning in the sea of information and gaining little benefit for your practice.
Data security is also paramount. According to a recent American Medical Association report, nearly 75% of people worry about the privacy of their health data.
The good news is that collecting and analyzing veterinary practice data is less daunting than it sounds. Read on to learn what metrics to track and how to use them to extract useful insights.
The Importance of Utilizing Veterinary Practice Analytics
Your veterinary clinic database can be a goldmine if you know what information to collect and how to use it. But before you start gathering patient and customer data, you should learn what data analytics means in the first place.
Data analytics, also known as business analytics or business intelligence, is the practice of collecting, monitoring, and analyzing historical data about various aspects of your business — revenue, billing, productivity, growth, diagnosis types, client retention rates, and so on.
The resulting insights can help you understand how the practice is performing at any given time and inform future business decisions. By leveraging data-backed strategies, you can improve practice performance, save money, retain existing clients and their pets, attract new business, boost your revenue, and more.
You don’t need to be a data analyst to do this. Thanks to recent technological advances, you can now use veterinary practice management software to automate some or all of your data collection and analysis.
These programs are purpose-built for the needs of veterinary professionals and don’t require specialized technical knowledge. Your veterinary team should be able to navigate these solutions with confidence after the initial training and a short adjustment period.
What Veterinary Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Should You Track?
They call it big data for a reason: Your business generates enormous amounts of veterinary data. Certain data points will be more useful than others, so it’s essential to know what KPIs to watch out for. Some of the most important ones include:
Active clients
According to Harvard Business Review, nurturing your existing customer base can be up to 25 times cheaper than attracting new potential clients, and increasing retention rates by just 5% boosts profits by 25-95%. Keeping an up-to-date patient record of your active customers enables you to serve them better by personalizing client communication and offering targeted services for their pets.
Scheduled production vs. unscheduled clients
Getting more appointments out of existing clients is a quick and easy way to boost your bottom line. You want to stay on top of your calendar and proactively nudge clients whose pets are past due for their annual check-ups or other procedures.
New client appointments, reappointments, and cancellations
If you’ve had an unusual dearth of new admissions or a spike in cancellations over a given period, you may need to ramp up your marketing or reach out to pet owners to better understand their needs.
Valuable Insights You Can Pull From Veterinary Data Analytics
We already mentioned that data analytics could help you track important metrics such as client retention and acquisition rates. Here are other insights you can glean from veterinary practice data and use them to continually fine-tune your services and scale your business:
Practice performance benchmarking
It’s always helpful to know where you stand in the veterinary industry. By comparing the KPIs of your veterinary hospital or clinic against those of similar-sized companion animal practices in your area, you can evaluate your performance in a broader context and identify opportunities for improvement.
Billing and expenses
Business analytics are a fantastic window into the finances of your practice. Monitoring your fees, billing, expenses, and other financial KPIs in real-time allows you to better predict revenue and spot budget deviations as soon as they occur.
Inventory management
By tracking consumption trends in your practice over time, you can keep a tab on inventory levels and ensure that supplies are always well-stocked but not over-stocked. For instance, you can anticipate and plan for seasonal spikes in demand for certain services, such as vaccinations or anti-flea and anti-tick treatments.
Transform Your Business Analytics Using North America’s Best Veterinary Software
The veterinary profession is challenging as it is. As a veterinarian and practice manager, your main focus should be veterinary medicine, patient care, and the day-to-day running of your business, not data spreadsheets.
At Weave, we make data collection and analysis easy so you can spend more time on veterinary care and less time crunching numbers. Our veterinary software allows you to:
- Easily track and view practice analytics
- Collect patient forms electronically and flow the information into the patient’s medical record
- Automatically request and collect payments to keep a tab on billing
- Streamline client communication by sending automated appointment reminders, marketing messages, and more
- Request and receive customer reviews
- Access and manage schedules remotely
- Connect with pet owners via phone, SMS, and a user-friendly mobile app
The numbers speak for themselves. On average, our clients report a 35% boost in office efficiency, 95% fewer missed calls daily, and $300 saved in monthly phone bills.
Don’t just take our word for it. Get a demo to see how Weave’s veterinary management software can unlock the power of big data and transform your business.
