Managing Your Own Care Plan Program?

The concept of care plans, where a consumer can make monthly payments over the course of a year, has been around for quite some time at a particular large hospital chain, but has been more of a recent phenomenon for independent practices. On the surface, care plans sound simple. Create some plans by age group and species, maybe use the practice management system’s care plan module, if available, and debiting customer accounts each month for the monthly fee. No problem!

However, as the program grows, there are various other aspects of running a care plan program that arise and create more work than originally anticipated. The day-to-day tasks can really add up for your team members, taking them away from other equally important responsibilities such as pet parent education and communication. These include:

Missed Payment Management

• Managing the process of outbound calls, month-to-month account balance accruals, partial payments and more
• Realizing that if you use a practice management software care plan solution, it does not help in any way with missed payments or tracking AR, and you have to build your own process and system to track and manage all the associated tasks
• Recognizing that the industry averages a 6-8% missed payment rate each month is a reality that must be dealt with. And, with 2.6 calls needed per missed payment on average, for a 300-plan program, you are looking at roughly 55 calls per month to track people down and get issues resolved.

Plan Renewals

• Puppy and kitten plans automatically renewing to adult plans
• Coordinating plan launches with annual price increases, and making sure the previous version of the plan renews to the new version of the plan
• Managing pet parent custom requests – adding or subtracting optional services such as dentistry on an annual basis
• Tracking non-renewal rates, and understanding the “why” around these non-renewals, can be quite a headache, and often very difficult for the practice to track and manage manually

Optional Services

• Many self-run programs do not offer optional services to tailor plans to the individual pet, as it becomes too hard to track
• Even if optional services are offered, most do not have the ability to easily add optional services per plan or do so mid-plan term
• Automation of options to either renew or not to renew as the plan renews

And then, there is the Business of Wellness. Once you get your arms around running the day-to-day Practice of Wellness basics, you will want to make sure the program is as positively impactful as it can. You will want to easily access data such as:

• Are your pets really worth it – i.e. does your practice earn more revenue from care plan pets than pets that are not on care plans?
• Exactly how much do clients with pets on care plan spend?
• How does your program stack up with similar practices – are you doing better or worse?
• How do you build a membership club concept that engenders loyalty and referrals?
• What can be learned from other practices and applied to our program to improve?

Fact, a well-run program can see annual per pet spend in the $1,250-$1,600 range, so if you have 300 plans, that is a $480,000 piece of your business each year, which definitely deserves your focus and attention to ensure it continues to thrive. Areas that well-run care plan programs focus on include:

Brand Strategy and Marketing

• Are you building your brand?
• Are you creating a club concept to help drive new sign ups and higher renewal rates?
• New and creative marketing programs, focused on your demographics around your practice, to get new pet parents into the practice
• Generation of marketing materials to support your marketing program

Analytics to track metrics for current year and year-over-year improvement – e.g. new plan sign ups, non-renewals, cancellations, optional services adoption, and more.