Getting Paid For The Services You Offer

[Part of this material has been taken from Business Basics for Veterinarians and Management Basics for Veterinarians, and may not be reproduced without written consent of author]

Veterinary medicine is also veterinary business and it is not enough just to provide excellent service, but to receive prompt payment for this exemplary service. In fact, even the very best customer service and excellent medical care will lead to practice failure if they don’t result in commensurate revenues. It is expensive to practice high-quality veterinary medicine, to hire and keep the best employees, to keep up with new developments and receive continuing education, and to constantly improve the tools used in the practice and the skills practiced by doctors and staff in that practice. Accordingly, getting paid for the services you offer is every bit as important as the quality of customer service and medical care that you provide.

There are many strategies for assuring revenues and some of the most effective are those most underutilized by practices. All have the same underlying premise – practice excellent medicine, keep the client informed at all times about medical and cost issues, and EXPECT payment for services rendered. This may seem straightforward, but too many practices invest heavily in staff and equipment, deliver excellent service, and then seem to find any excuse possible not to have the client pay for it. Sometimes there is a mental block about large bills, about crossing an imaginary boundary between reasonable and unreasonable amounts. Then there is the argument about a doctor’s perceived inadequacies, about charging for tests that more experienced veterinarians might not need to run, that costs for veterinary care must be discounted to the public (after all, it’s only an animal… right?) or running tests for the veterinarian’s benefit so not charging the client (because that would be inappropriate, or so the argument goes).

It is a fact of life that providing excellent medical care is a costly enterprise. Not being able to collect on that provision of excellent medical care is a costly mistake that few veterinarians can afford.

Establishing policies for prompt payment and not being apologetic for veterinary charges is a good place to start. If fees have been established with value pricing or cost-plus pricing in mind, there are no apologies to be made. Things are costly today. Medicine is expensive; cars are expensive; a good cup of coffee is expensive. Nobody but veterinarians seems to be apologizing, or taking global responsibility for holding down charges. Imagine going into a Starbucks, wanting to place an order for your favorite java, but then not wanting the pay the price requested. The result – no coffee for you. Or, imagine going into a Mercedes dealership, but wanting to buy it for the same price as a Kia. The result – no car for you.

What about veterinary medicine? Say you are a pet owner and just bought a new pup from a pet store. It’s not even a purebred and you paid $800 for it because that is the price that you were quoted, the sales clerk was not prepared to lower the price, and so you believe that is the value of the animal. You take that pup to your neighborhood veterinary hospital and they are prepared to perform an ovariohysterectomy for $200 – including the time and expertise of a veterinary doctor, her staff, full general anesthesia, use of the operating room, monitoring equipment, and a night of hospitalization. Is that really possible?

The result of such an experience is that the ridiculously low price of the spay has set a benchmark for the cost of veterinary surgery in the mind of the customer and reinforced in the client’s mind that the veterinarian believes it is his/her job to subsidize the health care of animals. This is not a lecture on fees, though, but rather a primer a primer on how to get paid for services rendered. The approach to be explored is thus how to provide “value” to clients for the services provided, and a variety of techniques to ensure that clients do pay for the value that they receive.