While your primary concern is helping your patients, as a veterinary practice owner or manager, you also need to be able to drive profitability. Like with any other business, certain factors can positively or negatively affect your profitability. It is essential to be aware of these factors and understand how they work in your practice.
Certain recurring costs enable you to run your business smoothly. If these costs are higher than your profits, though, you will be operating at a loss. They include:

  • The cost of goods and services: Consumables such as gloves, materials for wound dressings, cotton wool, etc. are things that you need every day. You might also need to replace equipment and other items around your office from time to time.
  • Staffing associated costs: Your practice will not run itself. In addition to the veterinary doctors, you might need to have nurses, pharmacists, laboratory technicians, radiographers, receptionists, office managers, cleaners, and other staff. These people will need to be paid an agreed-upon amount monthly, regardless of how much your practice makes that month. When negotiating salaries, take into consideration how much you make every month so you can keep up with the payments.
  • Location expenses: If you are renting your office space or paying for a mortgage, these payments will need to be made every month, no matter what.

Factors for Driving Veterinary Profitability

You can drive your practice profitability by reducing your expenses or increasing your revenue. It is best to minimize the expenses first. That way, increased profits are not spent on unnecessary costs.
Specific methods for driving veterinary profitability include:

  • Ensuring that your prices are correctly set up: It is essential to do extensive research when deciding on the costs that you will set for all the different services that you offer. While it might be relatively straightforward to determine the prices of medications and other goods that you might sell, choosing the costs of your services might be more nuanced. Setting consultation, radiological, and various service fees needs to be done with care. If they’re too high, you might drive customers away. If they’re too low, you might end up operating at a loss.
  • Leveraging technology to reduce operating costs and improve efficiency: The advantages of technology are endless. Automating tasks such as making appointments, sending reminders and bills, and responding to frequently asked questions using a chatbot reduces the amount of work that the person staffing the front desk will have to do and will drive productivity and by extension, revenue.
  • Setting a monthly budget for ordering the products that you need/stock: Over time, you know how much of a particular product you sell or consume in a month. Buy enough to last you for at least a month and a half. Buying and storing products for multiple months is just tying up money that you could be using to accomplish other things. Monitor the levels of the products, and make sure to re-order before you entirely run out. You can even automate the re-ordering of these products!
  • Automating repetitive tasks: This will free up your time, enabling you to accomplish more profitable activities.
  • Performing regular process audits to ensure that things are working as they should: Sometimes, an approach might not be as practical as it seems to be. It is essential to catch this before it starts to drain your profitability.

How Can the Asteris Keystone Suite Help You Drive Veterinary Profitability?

The Asteris Keystone Suite is a complete end-to-end solution designed specifically for veterinary practices for all your needs. It can be customized, and when correctly leveraged, it can be instrumental in driving veterinary profitability.
Here are specific ways that it can help drive profitability:

  • Manage your images: By streamlining the processes involved in creating, accessing, and sharing your images and reports, it saves time and enables staff to spend time pursuing more profitable tasks.
  • Improve your workflow: It helps make scheduling appointments seamless and enables you to monitor the status of radiological exams easily.
  • Improve consultation and collaboration among all the different practice stakeholders: It simplifies collaboration and optimizes every phase of the referral and consultation process.

Conclusion

Making a profit and reducing unnecessary expenses is crucial for any practice. Applying these suggestions will help you drive your veterinary practice profitability.
Here at Asteris, it’s our goal to help veterinarians make sound medical decisions with ease, clarity, and confidence by giving them the tools and insights that they need to optimize the way they work.
If you’re ready to stop feeling like there’s not enough time in your day, we can help you optimize your imaging processes and the way you work. Contact our specialists today to get started!