In our last post, we covered why it’s crucial to ensure your wellness solution addresses both the Practice of Wellness and the Business of Wellness. If you missed it, you can find it here.

In the next several posts, we’re diving into the specifics of these concepts, because addressing both the Practice of Wellness and the Business of Wellness in your practice can spell the difference between a high-performing wellness plan program or a floundering one. Knowledge is power — a truism that applies in pet care, as in life.

Here, we begin by covering the six goals of the Practice of Wellness.

1. Practice-specific Preventive Care Protocols Designed into Plans
Rolling out a wellness plan program represents an opportunity to solidify and build consistency in the standards of care in your practice. You’ll want to base your plans on what your doctors regard as the ultimate measure of healthcare for every pet.

For example, which preventive care services do you feel are core for every pet? Your approach to preventive care represents an opportunity to stand apart from the competition, with protocols demonstrating your high standards and best practices. If your preventive care protocols aren’t in writing, the pre-launch period is a perfect time to come to a consensus on consistency in care.

2. Optional Services to Allow Tailoring a Plan to the Pet
Optional services are critical for customization. These services personalize your core plans to the lifestyle and needs of each pet — differentiating your practice, building pet owner loyalty, and avoiding price competition with nearby competitors. VCP data shows that tailoring plans to the pet can boost overall spending by 20% or more.

Your wellness plan program is a vehicle to promote value-added services beyond preventive care, such as boarding, grooming, daycare, and beyond. Do you have underutilized services in your practice? How about a new technology you’d like to promote? Your wellness plan program is the ideal vehicle to showcase these Services.

3. Increased Compliance for Services In and Out of the Plan
Surveys show pet parents want to provide the best care for their animals. Wellness plans make it simple for owners to follow veterinarians’ recommendations and become better educated about the needs of their beloved pets, at every age. The result? Better compliance.

Compliance climbs to above 90% on recommendations for services inside and outside of the plans, according to VCP’s data. In wellness plan programs with a dental benefit, dental compliance soars to 99%.

4. Increased Client Spending Per Pet
Well-implemented wellness plan programs can produce 10% overall revenue growth for practices in the first year — and almost triple that in three years or less, VCP has found. Owners with pets in VCP-run wellness plan programs spend roughly $900 more per year than they would have outside the plan, with total spending often reaching $1,500 per pet each year.

Well-run wellness plan programs also lift overall revenue by attracting new clients. VCP’s research shows almost 60% of wellness plan clients are net new to the Practice.

5. Increased Visits Per Pet on an Annual Basis
A well-run wellness plan program leads to an uptick in visits, as clients take advantage of the services in the plan — and opt for additional services. Professional service visits by wellness clients jumped 67% after the clients purchased wellness plans, according to research in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. Compliance for client visits for recommended exams was 93%.

6. Ease of Implementation and Management
Your wellness plan solution shouldn’t be a hassle for your team to launch and use. Instead, the solution should allow staff members to quickly enroll new pets, select relevant optional services, and finalize the plan agreement. The solution should be customizable, to include practice-specific preventive care protocols, not cookiecutter standards.

The solution should include tools for your team to handle various renewal conditions efficiently and include full payment and missed payment management (to address the 6-7% missed payment rate that’s common among wellness clients for expired, lost, and stolen cards). You also want a plan that scales as you grow, while freeing you from spending precious hours watch-dogging the system.

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post on the six goals of the Practice of Wellness. Look for our next post, where we’ll help you build a checklist of features to reach these goals.