How to Make Vet Clinics More Efficient

/0 Comments/in /by

When running a successful veterinary clinic, it’s vital that your day-to-day operations are efficient and well-maintained. Without a methodical approach to work, your team may face an uphill battle and patient care can be impacted as a result. 

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s more important than ever to streamline your processes, future-proof the clinic and save yourself the headache of ‘catching up’ down the line.

That’s why we’ve put together some top strategies for making your veterinary practice more efficient:

 

Manage appointments on the cloud

Scheduling software such as Panacea lets you manage appointments and reminders for clients. Automatic reminders save your admin team having to manually track who needs messaging and ensures that no one is accidentally missed.

Having regular reminders like this can help to reduce no-shows and last-minute cancellations, allowing for better use of the clinic’s time and resources. 

Additionally, Panacea allows for online booking directly from your website, which can make it easier for clients to schedule appointments without needing to call. 

However you approach this, at least it will take some pressure off your plate. 

 

Digitise your records

Another way to improve efficiency is to implement a digital record-keeping system. We’ve talked about this in our 2023 New Year’s resolutions article, but let’s discuss how going digital does more than just clearing out your workspace.

By transitioning from paper records to an electronic system, veterinary clinics can reduce the amount of time spent on manual administrative tasks.

Filing becomes a simple matter of clicking, dragging and dropping. Naming, organising and completing forms is suddenly much faster when you can type what you want or even auto-populate fields. 

Forms you could easily digitise include:

  • Anaesthetic
  • Surgical
  • Dentistry
  • Euthanasia consent
  • Patient history questionnaires, etc.

Electronic records also make it easier to access important information quickly, which can be critical in emergency situations. Say goodbye to physically combing through a mess of files, when all it takes is a keyword or two to bring up exactly what you need.

 

Revitalise the clinic experience

In addition to technology, there are some more ‘analogue’ steps that you can take to improve your clinic workflow.

For example, implementing a triage system can help prioritise urgent cases and ensure that patients are seen in a timely manner. You can read a little more about it in this article or by speaking to local clinics who already do this.

Another way to improve the efficiency of your care is by having a designated person responsible for managing the flow of patients and coordinating with staff. This may be an additional task for your administrator, but making this a dedicated role can allow for greater focus and more opportunities to innovate.

 

Review and reassess

It’s also important for veterinarians to regularly review and evaluate their existing processes to identify areas for improvement. This can include conducting staff meetings to discuss ideas, implementing new protocols and regularly reviewing and updating standard operating procedures. 

If you have this in place already, but your meetings only include managerial staff, consider opening the floor to all workers in order to hear input from across the clinic landscape.

 

Don’t lose track of the client experience

While improving your workload is extremely important, a lot of the time that you save with these processes can be funnelled back towards your clients. After all, true efficiency includes preventing unnecessary confusion and stress, which benefits you as well.

Providing a strong client experience can mean talking to them about their pet’s health, offering education and resources (many of which can be quickly generated via templates) to help them care for their pets, and being responsive to their needs and concerns. 

All of this will let you maintain a loyal client base, bolster your local reputation and focus on the bigger issues.

 

—

 

Overall, there are many steps that veterinary clinics can take to make their practices more efficient. By implementing new technology, streamlining existing processes and focusing on high-quality customer service, veterinary clinics can ease up the intensity of daily operations and strengthen the areas that matter the most. 

Should Vets Join the Metaverse?

/0 Comments/in /by

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard the hype about the ‘metaverse’ and how it’s supposedly going to be the biggest thing since smartphones, or maybe even the internet itself.

Breathless news articles exclaim that companies are flocking to the metaverse en-masse, eager to stake out a claim to (supposedly) valuable and scarce virtual real-estate. The metaverse gold rush is analogous to how companies flocked to the web in the late 1990s, we’re told, where companies that were late missed out on valuable ‘.com’ addresses.

The billions being invested into the metaverse by tech titans such as Meta, Alphabet/Google and Microsoft is proof that the metaverse will be huge, according to most media reports, so you’d better get on to the metaverse or you’re going to miss out!

 

What does this mean for vet clinics?

Should you have FOMO about establishing a presence on the metaverse in case you miss out?

In short, no you shouldn’t.

The metaverse is a dud. It’s a non-starter. You’re not missing out on being there now and you’re very unlikely to miss out if you’re not on the metaverse in future.

 

What is the metaverse?

If you’re unsure of what the metaverse is, you’re not alone. Many studies show that less than 20% of 18 – 60 year-olds claim to understand what the metaverse is, despite Mark Zuckerberg trying (increasingly desperately) to convince us how important it’s going to be to us all.

The metaverse is a virtual world similar in nature to the world wide web, but one that’s navigated in virtual reality (VR). At minimum to interact with the metaverse you’d need to don a VR headset and that’s where things quickly start to fall apart.

 

Why it isn’t worth the investment

The metaverse is a dud because most of us don’t have a VR headset and, more importantly, very few of us are ever going to want to buy one.

Computers, then smartphones, were wildly successful because they are usable within the world that we occupy. Computers have become increasingly mobile, going from the desktop, to the laptop, to the tablet then the smartphone. As they’ve done so they’ve become increasingly indispensable to most of us. If you really want to scare someone at Halloween tell them they’ve left home without their mobile and watch their reaction.

VR, by contrast, doesn’t fit within our world. To use VR (and, by extension, to enter the metaverse) requires us to leave our world and to enter a completely different and virtual one. It requires us to be completely cut off and disconnected from the goings on around us. One of the primary functions of VR headsets is to shut out the sights and sounds of the real world so we can become totally immersed in the virtual one displayed on its tiny little screens.

While this can be great for immersive functions, such as playing games or watching movies, it’s downright awful for just about everything else.

Wearing a VR headset in public is near impossible. Not if you value life and limb, at least. Although I could wear one at my desk or at home, doing so renders me completely disconnected from those around me. The benefits of wearing the VR headset and entering the metaverse simply don’t outweigh the disadvantages of being disconnected from the real world around me.

–

At Panacea, we’re strong advocates for telemedicine and we believe that the number of vets providing remote services will continue to grow rapidly over the coming years. We don’t believe that VR will play much of a role in this, however, and the metaverse will hardly feature.

We’d call the metaverse a fad, but it doesn’t even qualify as that. For it to be a fad there has to be a period of intense interest from at least a subset of the community. Unfortunately for Mark Zuckerberg the metaverse has already started fading into obscurity without many of us even giving it a go.

10 Handy IT Tips for Vets

/0 Comments/in /by

At Panacea we’re not only software nerds – we’re IT support nerds too!  We’ve got over 20 years’ experience in providing high quality IT advice and support to vets and to other businesses.

So here’s our top 10 handy IT tips for vets.  Panacea customers are welcome to ask for free IT advice – just use the support function from within the app.

Please share your tips in the comments!

  1. Turning it off and back on again will often do the trick. From a PC that’s running slow or an Internet router that won’t work – msot of the time a reboot will indeed get it back to working as normal. Just remember to properly shut it down and restart it if it’s a computer or mobile device (use the restart function).  It’s also a good idea to reboot computers at least weekly to free up unused memory, apply updates, etc.  Consider doing a restart just before you go home/switch off for the night so updates can apply while you’re not using your device.
  2. Your mail really should be on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.  There are lots of other mail services, but Google and Microsoft have spent billions on creating and improving these services and they really are hard to beat.  Consider using Google Workspace, as it includes Google’s sublime online productivity suite (Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.)  There’s no need to shell out $15 (or so) per month for Microsoft Office when Google Workspace let’s you create, edit and store your documents on the cloud.
  3. Store all of your data on the cloud.  Backups are so 2012.  Products like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Panacea make it easy to store all of your data on the cloud, where it’s backed up and protected for you.  Do an audit of all of your computers to determine which (if any) still store data that you wouldn’t want to lose if the worst happens.  Then figure out how to migrate it to the cloud.  In the meantime, make sure that data is backed up daily until it has been migrated to the cloud.
  4. It’s really easy to create professional email addresses that use your clinic’s domain name.  Many clinics use their own domain name (e.g. ‘acmevets.com’) for their website, but still use gmail or other generic email addresses, which can look a bit unprofessional.  It’s super simple to set up email using Google Worksapce or Microsoft 365 and your own domain name.  It only takes a few minutes and you can redirect your old generic email accounts to your new, branded ones, so you won’t miss out on any incoming emails.
  5. Providing free wifi to your clients is easy. Once you’ve got unlimited broadband, that is. Look for a wireless access point (WAP) that supports the creation of a ‘guest’ network – you use this to provide clients with free WiFi without letting them access your own network.  Clients often appreciate free WiFi while they’re waiting.
  6. Password security is important.  Thankfully it’s also easy.  Use a password manager, such as LastPass or NordPass – these are often free and can run on all of your devices.  Make sure you use complex passwords that are hard to guess.  Never share passwords and always use unique passwords for each app/service (this is where the password manager comes in).  If your app or service supports it then always enable two factor authentication.
  7. Train all of your staff on how to identify and respond to suspicious emails and other ‘social engineering’ hacks.  You’d be surprised at the lengths that bad actors will go to try and defraud you and your users.  This can include the use of email, social media, SMS text messages and even direct phone calls to try and scam you.  Thankfully avoiding such attacks is relatively easy.  Never click on links that you don’t recognise and trust and always double check the email address/phone number or user ID before you respond to messages.  Never give out information of any kind, particularly passwords and 2FA codes, to anyone you don’t know and trust.  Always have a trusted IT services provider who you can call on for advice when you’ve suffered an attack.
  8. Keep all of your software up to date.  Software updates don’t have to be a drag – they keep your devices running optimally and help protect you against software exploits (bugs that hackers may be able to use to steal data, etc.)  We recommend using an IT provider with tools to keep all of your software up to date, not just Windows.
  9. Wired is always better than wireless.  WiFi is great, but wireless connections are no match for wired ones when it comes to performance and reliability.  Connect your clinics’ devices to your LAN via high quality wired connections wherever possible.  It can be worth the investment to install good quality data cabling to places you don’t already have it.  Visit speedtest.net if you think your Internet connection is running slowly to get accurate performance stats.
  10. Think about how you can automate your clinic’s processes.  Meet with your team once a month and discuss what you could automate and how.  Look at how this will benefit your clinic and, most important, your customers and patients.  Yes, change can be daunting, but if you’re still taking bookings over the phone, using paper-based systems, still doing your bookkeeping in a spreadsheet, etc. then you’re probably wasting a lot more of yours, your personnel’s and your client’s time than you realise.  Automating and improving business processes is often easier, less disruptive and more rewarding than you think.  That’s why Panacea is full of automations for mundane and repetitive tasks.