Only VCP Delivers Both the Practice and Business of Wellness for a Successful Holistic Care Plan Program
Overview
VCP is empowering practices to compete and thrive in an evolving pet care industry. New services, changing demographics and online applications are changing the way consumers behave and purchase services. These changing behaviors carry over to how pet parents utilize and pay for care, treatment, pet services and other necessities for their pets. These new trends are altering the pet parent/veterinarian relationship.
At VCP, we believe that, as a pet health expert, the veterinarian should be at the heart of pet care. We also believe that by reinventing and changing how the industry views and utilizes wellness plans, veterinary practices can better deliver on the promise of healthier pets and a healthy practice. A more creative use of care plans helps realign the veterinarian/pet parent relationship, driving much deserved revenue back to the practice. To better understand how to create the most effective programs possible, we divide wellness into two parts, the Practice of Wellness and the Business of Wellness, both equally important.
The Practice of Wellness
The design, set-up and day-to-day management of your care plan program is crucial. The Practice of Wellness focuses on preventive care protocols and software to automate the process of enrolling new members, providing services and collecting the money associated with the plans. At VCP, we partner with you to quickly and easily create, launch and manage a program specific to your practice, preventive care protocols and pet parent needs.
Practice of Wellness Goals:
- Practice-specific preventive care protocols designed into plans
- Optional services to allow tailoring a plan to the pet
- Increased compliance for services in and out of plan
- Increased spending per pet
- Increased visits per pet on an annual basis
- Ease of implementation and management
Features of the Practice of Wellness:
- Comprehensive software
- Renewal automation
- Recurring billing and recurring payments
- Comprehensive payment and missed payment management
- Customer communication automation
- Ability to allow chronic illness plans that provide affordable monthly payments for non-care plan services
- Healthier pets living longer lives
Additional VCP Areas of Expertise for the Practice of Wellness:
Plan Design and Pricing
VCP enables plans that deliver your preventive care protocols. The addition of optional services allows core plans to be personalized to the needs of each pet, differentiating your practice, building pet parent loyalty and avoiding price competition with competitors.
Member Enrollment
Easy plan choice and enrollment allow the team to quickly and methodically enroll new pets, provide relevant optional services, and finalize the plan agreement. Automated communications send a welcome message to the pet parent, providing them login information to their practice-branded portal.
Training and Support
A wellness coach is with you at every step, providing insight and training on best practices, how to best communicate your care plan offering with your pet parents, and on use of the software. Your coach continues to work with you after launch to help ensure your ongoing success.
Recurring Billing vs Recurring Payments
Most offerings simply provide for recurring payments (the basic movement of funds from one account to another). VCP is the only solution that also offers recurring billing, which is vital. Why? This means your VCP care plan solution creates payment notification reminders, generates statements, incorporates a full accounts receivable system, provides a complete payment management solution (including missed payment management, payment adjustment tools, etc.) and provides a practice-branded customer portal so that your clientele can manage their accounts. For more information visit www.vcp.vet/why-recurring-billing.
Proactive Missed Payment Management
A great payment management process starts with proactively eliminating missed payments in the first place. VCP has various features that reduce missed payments including upcoming payment and missed payment reminders, expiring card reminders, smart reattempts, and more. If the VCP features don’t stop it in the first place, then VCP provides the resources, on behalf of your practice, to deal with the payment issues – making it super easy for your practice to focus on treating pets, not calling people about missed payments!
Management Tools – Taking Care of All of the “Small Things”
Care plan programs at scale, 200+ plans, can create a lot of work for practices if the system does not manage all of the exceptions that occur. Differentiating features of the VCP system include:
- Practice dashboard that allows you to understand key metrics about your program
- Complete payment management including managing one-off payments at the practice, chargebacks, partial payments, etc.
- Full accounts receivable system to manage the pet parent’s wellness A/R balance, if any
- Full missed payment management to deal with the 6-8% missed payment rate exhibited by wellness plans across the country (VCP cures to less than 1%)
- Smart renewal logic including non-renewing plans and services, age-based renewals, clean cut-offs between plan changes for pricing, etc., and sophisticated renewal instructions to deal with pet parent requests
- Managing care plan production pay for both enrolling bonuses and service delivery
- Smart cancellation logic to quickly identify settlement amounts
- Full accounting mapped to industry standard General Ledger accounts
- How the Practice of Wellness is supported is important. VCP provides key differentiating software and services to facilitate your program, reducing the amount of time to manage it, and driving success in the Practice of Wellness.
The Business of Wellness
Based on substantial analysis at various existing practices with well-run care plan programs, it is not unusual to see a total annual pet spend in the range of $1,250 to $1,600 per pet on care plans, an increase of 175%-200% for most practices over non-care plan pet spend. Assuming a program has 300 plans, that is a $480,000 per year line of business within a practice. VCP believes that any program of that size, or larger, in a veterinary practice should have a well-defined set of business management tools and procedures to help manage the program.
At VCP, we are looking to change how the industry thinks about care plan programs and revolutionize capabilities at a practice level. We brought together veterinarians, industry leaders and business strategists to create a program that delivers upon two key drivers: promoting healthier pets and driving practice health.
As a result, we have defined the Business of Wellness, which is a combination of processes, procedures and tools that maximize the benefits of a well-run care plan program.
Business of Wellness Goals:
- Build practice brand and culture
- Build a club/membership program around your plans for loyalty
- Real-time program analytics and insight
- Incorporate additional areas of the practice into the membership (e.g. kennel, grooming, spa, holistic medicine, chronic illness plans and more)
- Increase practice valuation
Features of the Business of Wellness:
- Innovative and best practices for people, process, and technology
- Multi-dimensional pricing analysis
- Specialty branding and marketing
- Support for employee plans
- Real-time data and visibility
- Advanced dashboards to measure program success
- Utilization and data analytics with an action center
- Support for industry accounting standards to allow you to manage your business and compare and contrast to other practices like yourself
- Hope is not a strategy (metrics, measurement, analytics and retraining)
Additional VCP Areas of Expertise in the Business of Wellness Goals
Branding and Culture
Because today’s pet parents are bombarded with messages, practices must stand out from the crowd. Building your brand and team culture is crucial to growing and retaining clients. VCP helps you integrate your care plan program throughout the practice and helps build consistency in messaging to build your brand and your relationships.
Your Message, Delivered Fast and Easy
VCP helps you create clear and concise marketing messages, easily understood by both pet parents and staff. This is reinforced through the marketing artifacts created by VCP on your behalf. Artifacts include items like the doctor’s message, marketing kits, social media banner ads, and much more.
An Ecosystem of Partners
VCP has assembled our “village” of partners that help promote your program as well. Dynamic on-hold phone systems and digital display messages can be integrated into your marketing approach. Telemedicine can be integrated into your care plan program as well, addressing some of the growing trends desired by pet parents. While the ecosystem is still in its early stages, VCP is at the forefront of integrating these into your program.
Real-Time Program Visibility
Understanding what is happening in real-time is important. VCP includes a dashboard that allows visibility to key program metrics providing insight and actionable items. Our wellness coaches use the information to proactively communicate trends and help you succeed.
Advanced Analytics
If you choose to subscribe to VCP’s advanced analytics module, you will be able to understand things like:
- How much more do my pets on care plans spend than pets not on care plans?
- How many of my care plan pets would have come in anyway and how much more are they spending?
- What overall impact is this making on my practice?
- How do I compare to my peers and the “big guys”?
Building Your Program Long Term (Membership Clubs and Additional Services)
A care plan program can extend throughout the practice and provide a comprehensive foundation to growing your practice. We start with preventive care and discuss other offerings that may be of interest to your clientele and build a club concept to drive additional value.
- A care plan program is not about discounts, it is about showing value and building relationships, so adding options and promotions to your plans is a smart way to extend your care plan program while promoting other services you offer. Long term, you may wish to add specialty plans such as nutrition programs, or perhaps chronic illness plans for common ailments, or possibly integrate membership plans for your kennel or grooming services
- VCP is with you at every step, providing both the Practice and Business of Wellness to build your brand and your vision of pet wellness and the health of your practice
Promotions
In support of building a club/loyalty aspect to your wellness program, the VCP promotions module allows you to integrate other items of value into your plans. Common concepts include:
- Coupon provided by a local kennel grooming/spa service or pet supply store
- Manufacturer coupons (assuming your manufacturers will participate)
- Other offers such as insurance, training, etc.
Our Focus: Pet and Practice Wellness
VCP is the leading care plan solution provider and the only one to offer both the Practice and Business of Wellness. The Practice of Wellness delivers the leading software to design, launch and manage a successful care plan program utilizing your preventive protocols, tailoring plans to specific pet needs as well as improving and increasing compliance and practice growth. Our exclusive Business of Wellness delivers strategies and tools that further fuel growth and compliance. The Business of Wellness includes real-time program analytics and data, membership club support and program extensions to further grow your practice in both the short and long term.
Looking for More Information on the Business of Wellness
Managing your own care plan program is costly
The time, process and plan limits can be costing your practice more than you think.
VCP’s proprietary Business
of Wellness
Innovative software, capabilities, and thinking to make your program thrive.
Recurring billing vs
recurring payments
They are not the same, recurring billing enables greater automation, management and ease.
