Over the last 5 yeas, the game has changed dramatically and if you have not looked at your practice management software (PMS) lately – then DO SO NOW!
All over the world I see SO many clinics who are paying ‘through the nose’ for their PMS. Could this be you?
Most practices are using PMS that has a huge number of bells and whistles – that they frankly don’t use and will never need.
Many practices are paying well over $100.00 a month per session, per seat or per computer – this is just lining the pockets of the software people – not yours! This is just how CRAZY PEOPLE do it!
You should be looking to buy it outright and in two years or so you’ll be well ahead of your current ‘subscription based’ situation.
If you can’t buy it outright – MOVE ON – go to PMS that you can buy outright.
Cloud based – do you really need cloud based? Cloud based and also subscription based – could be a double killer blow.
Anyway – time to get off my ‘soap-box’.
To help you sort through this HUGE practice cost for yourself, I had a talk with Andrew Dovey from Clinic Ware.
You can watch the video or read the transcript or even listen to the podcast
We talk about PMS and what to look for – he shares some great insights…. Yes – here and there he ‘sprooks’ Clinic Ware – and rightfully so, it’s a truly excellent solution for most practices.
Click Here to listen to the Podcast See below to read the transcript P.S – BTW & FYI – there’s nothing in this for me, no kick-back, etc. CheersDiederik
Transcript:Diederik: Cool, okay. Hi, am here today with Andrew Dovey from Clinic Ware, Good afternoon Andrew.
Andrew: Hi, how are you?
Diederik: I just wanted to interview Andrew about Practice Management Software. He’s a guru in the practice management software field and one of the things that has been coming up recently quite a lot both in my personal field, from my personal client and from general Vet forums, there has been a lot of to and fro about Practice management software; what you should look at? what should be in it? what should you spend?
There are an innumerable number of questions and Andrew being the expert that he is I thought I would approach him and have a conversation with him.
Yes – obviously he has a vested in Clinic Ware, but we’ll still also talk in ‘generic’ terms as well.
Andrew we are going to run this conversation as a generic conversation as best you can please….
If we are having this conversation even 10 years ago, we’d we probably start off by saying, “Do we need Practice Management Software?” I think that those days are gone and I think we can all agree that Practice Management Software is now THE norm, that the days of 8×5 cards are gone.
So that being said Andrew what are the advantage of a good PMS versus one that’s so not good. If i was coming to you and say, “What i look for in PMS?”
Andrew: They all do the basics, but the better ones are obviously the ones that do the basics better than the very basic ones.
At the very minimum they should be dealing with reminder management or you are dealing with invoicing. Inventory management is very important obviously your patient records, prescription labelling and all your treatment management. Also of course sms and email reminders a day or so before a client visit.
Above that if it’s are a good system that you are dealing with, it should be quick and easy to use and be saving you time and making it easier to be doing things that you do regularly as a vet or a practice manager.
It should provide you with all the tools and information that you need to set up and run a marketing project and by you can make your clinic more profitable and most importantly it should do this without causing extra work.
So once the information is in the system it’s a question of how to get out in a sensible fashion, quickly and easily – and a lot of software makes this task hard and onerous.
The main thing pet owners ask themselves is, “Why should I be using this clinic and not that clinic?”, so that’s what running a small business is all about and that’s why you should be using Practice Management Software – it markets your practice to your clients.
Diederik: How does that work having a good Practice Management Software get a client to say this is a good practice or should I be using this practice?
Andrew: I think it’s about productivity, I remember years ago when I was a client, I received a postcard from my local vet saying, ‘Your dog is due for its vaccination.’ I was thinking ‘Wow! This is a clinic I am going to stick with’.
But of course with Practice Management Software it’s so easy to do that, you can email, you can send them an sms, and you never forget because it’s automatically set up to do it. It just makes doing all these lovely things so easy; you can even remember their birthday and send them a card. All these little personalized things can be done so much easier with a good system.
Diederik: You just talked about reminders and my passion is marketing and for everyone that is listening there was a study done probably about 10 years ago and this was a huge study looking into increasing reminder and recall rates.
So, one client group got a letter without an image of their pet on it and the other had the image of their pet on the reminder and do you know there was a 50% increase of people coming into the practice from the letter with the image on it versus the letter that didn’t have the image on it. WOW!
That leads to my next question. Can we easily collect images of the dogs and cats and have them print out on a certificate or on a letter or on an email in Clinic Ware?
Andrew: Absolutely and this is very easy to do. You can store almost anything which is useful for practice managers and so the more you can personalize things for your clients, the better.
Diederik: I think some of the PMS out there still can’t do this. I still work as a locum regularly because I enjoy clinical work and I like to be at the coal face and you there is so much software that I’ve had to use where you can collect and store images, but it’s damn hard.
Andrew: As was talking about, good systems for example like Clinic Ware, which has been for 10 years and i think that makes it a bit different being around so as to keep up with everything that happens in the industry and to sort out how the software works and works well and easily and intuitively. So a good system will do that image importation and printing at the click of a button so easily for you and make your life easier.
We checked in with a Vet clinic the other day and I was talking with the lead nurse and she said that with the previous system she felt more than an IT manager than a nurse. And I see that a lot because the software is made by IT people and not by people at the coal face who know what they want and need and when IT people design stuff for IT people, then it’s going to be hard work for you as a nurse or vet or receptionist to use it.
Diederik: Just deviating again; now with my managing head in place, I talk to so many practices that have complex managing software they pay a lot of money for it, and they barely use what’s available and they need to learn, have to start to use that other 80% of what’s available in that PMS and am not saying they should down size, but they need to change something. It’s just ludicrous.
Andrew: Some of the Clinic Ware stuff is ‘deeper’ than a what some practices need, but we don’t change people for the use of those systems, it’s all included. I see many practices paying more in their monthly ‘rental’ of their PMS per year than Clinic Ware costs in total, because of all those add-on modules they have and then don’t use. Those systems are far more complicated than you are going to ever need.
Diederik: Speaking about money can a good practice software system help me make more money in the practice?
Andrew: Absolutely, that is one of the great things about them once the data is in there, it’s a question of getting it out where you can use it and it can help you to make money. We just mentioned reminders which are a big, thing when somebody brings a pet in for examination, the system will automatically set up a reminder so that you can contact them again and if it’s done by you without any effort on your part then that’s a great thing.
You can similarly remind people with texting, when somebody comes in, or deworming, you can remind them before its due again, with a bag of dog food you can text and remind them by saying, “You’re out of food why don’t you come and get more” because they will need to get it somewhere.
Diederik: Can you remind me of the guy who took the American car industry back in the 60’s to Japan, I forgot his name – got it – Deming. He took the car industry away from American to Japan because in America they wanted to weld all the cars by hand and Japan was happy to use robots.
He developed the theory and proved it, that for every step of a process there is a 10% of an error so for every line-item on the invoice, there is a 10% chance of that line being wrong. With something complex like a cruciate repair, if you are doing the invoice for this manually rather than using computer templates, if you have 15 line items there is a 50% of having an error on the invoice – of missing charges.
So one of the big area I see where practices make money is by using templates.
Andrew: With things like estimations it’s easy to forget the small things like suture material or the wire or various injections, etc. So, yes, you can set the system up by using templates so that you don’t forget to charge for anything.
Diederik: Let’s talk about stock control because I see so many practices that have stock control ability with different software and never use it, so talk us through this.
Andrew: The problem with stock control is that it’s not difficult but it can be time consuming. Many people have got it on Excel by the way and so it should be easy to transfer, but most people do nothing and this is silly because it’s costing you a LOT of money.
I saw a report recently that said, not using a proper PMS to manage your stock, you will lose some 10% to 15% of your profit per year on wastage, shrinkage and loss of sales because you have not got the product.
It’s really an important thing to always know what stock you’ve got on hand; it will tell you what needs ordering before you run out of it, you can track sales by day so you don’t end up with all of stuff you have to throw away.
If your software told you that you’ve got a lot of something that is about to run of date in a month you can do a marketing campaign and you can contact clients and tell them you’ve got a special offer… there are lots of things like that you can do it will save you a lot of time and it will make you more money.
Diederik: I was doing some relief work four months ago and this is a place where I do regular relief work and I walked in on that day and there were no dog vaccines in the place – none! And I had dogs that needed vaccination and there was no vaccine in stock. They have Practice Management Software but they have never setup the stock control.
Andrew: It’s a terrifying thing something like that, think of the and happy clients. Stock control is confronting or can be to some practices and that’s why we provide full training but we run through the whole thing. As I said, it’s not difficult it’s a little time consuming to start with but it will save a lot of time and make a lot of money.
You need to use PMS to control stock – simple!
Diederik: Again stock control in another practice and this is my most regular locum job – in this practice lead nurse is going to be away for 8 weeks, and am terrified about what is going to happen to us when she’s away.
So PMS is largely going to work by itself once it’s set up. How else can I make a profit by using it, how’s the profit going to come from coupled with the things we have already talked about.
Andrew: That is how you basically make the extra money through improving your marketing. With a good system you should be able to filter the system along various line.
It can be more easy to target your marketing from stock control aspect and see what is not selling and if you are not selling as much of something or not doing as many procedures, then these are training opportunity for the staff.
There are million things which I classify as chores which are very easy to forget about but if the computer is setup correctly, you are never going to forget.
You set a template for creating an invoice, you create automatic marketing campaigns quickly and easily, you control your stock – so it doesn’t matter if someone is away.
Diederik: One of the areas I see where people fail (I’m putting my marketing hat on here as currently I’m running a 6-month marketing training program every year with 25 selected practices) and in these practices we have got a senior program running and giving us tons of revenue as well as helping lots of older pets; BUT 99% of practices don’t have a senior program because they don’t have the time or interest because it’s too hard to set this up in their PMS.
The people in my course send letters automatically to pets that hit a certain age – easy.
And then is a lumps and bumps program – so they get a letter if they have the word ‘lump’ in their history and we have a dental program for all dogs/cats who have a record of bad teeth.
And all this is SO easy to do if you have the right software – it’s GREAT medicine and it’s HIGHLY profitable.
But most practices never do this as it’s too hard to do with their current PMS.
One of the things that should be done is marketing like this, clients expect it nowadays and it’s a huge opportunity whether it’s a Clinic Ware practice or any of the other PMS out there. I say 99% of practice owners fail to take advantage of their practice management software
Andrew: I think to go back to what you were saying previously, in some systems doing something like that can be daunting and difficult to do that and to use a terrifying looking system can scare some people and also, some of the systems charge extra for the ability to do this, most of them charge extra for the ability to send out sms and ability to do extra work. I think that’s unfair!
Diederik: Our industry is far behind because I deal with all sorts of service provider. There is my pool guy, my hairdresser, dentists or whoever, they all send me reminder by sms two days before the appointment is due.
But in our industry it’s unusual to send things like that and to send the client reminder texts or emails a day or so before the appointments is due.
But the modern client expects it because it’s now the NORM for businesses to do this. Think of it this way, the vets MUST start doing this because missing just one appointment it costs you a huge amount of money.
Andrew: The thing is that the pet owners will take their pets to somewhere else to get that service. You are not conning them to do something they don’t want to do; you just need to make it easier for them to have you do it rather than someone else do it.
Diederik: Studies on this have been done as well and these studies say that 30% of people that miss an appointment, and these are generic studies with hairdressers, doctors, dentists, etc. 30% of those who miss appointments won’t come back to you because they are too embarrassed to put their face back in the door.
Andrew: I have heard about that and that’s a very good point.
Diederik: Let’s focus on Clinic Ware for a sec, you people do email and sms reminders – is it easy to set up?
Andrew: Absolutely very easy. If you can use a smartphone you can you can do this. It’s very easy, it’s been around for 10 years, we provide full training and also every year we charge a small amount for support and it’s very small and within reason. Most of the firms will charge extra for support. For us though, if it going to help you use Clinic Ware better then we won’t charge you extra to help you use it.
Diederik: The other thing that I have seen with PMS is customization, some practice software won’t allow you to do anything different than the way it’s set up, what are your thoughts about that, what is the advantage and the customization?
Andrew: The advantage here is that there are different needs from different stations.
For example, reception will want the address, the phone number and certain things. The vet is going to want more information of the clinical need of the pet.
So there are different ways you can set up this completely differently to suit individual workstations and another thing is the calendar…
At reception they might want to see all the vets; who is booked out and who isn’t and when they want to make an appointment they can see who is available and they can set up with to be able to see what’s relevant to you and to be able to set your workflow its management system and it has all the information in it and it will give you information and it’s going to help you as best possible.
Vets may want their workstation to show different things on the calendar and then the nurses again have different calendar needs.
Diederik: Another question that is been bugging me is that there so many softwares that are cloud based and I guess that one side of this equation is that cloud based is becoming more common, but I’m not that certain we need it in Vet – so what are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud based systems?
Andrew: I think from the point of view from the PMS develop is that it’s easier for them to manage cloud based systems.
The reason we haven’t gone cloud based is that your internet goes down there is nothing you can do. Unless you have multiple sites, why do you want cloud based? Computers are so cheap these days.
Also I was reading a report on the weekend about hackers getting into the system – and if they get into your PMS then you’ve got big issues.
I stupidly open an email the other day and it was encrypted with Ransomware – and they wanted me to pay them money to get it back.
With a system that is based on your own data base on your own server, this won’t happen and if the internet goes down you can still use the system and it’s much more secured and easier to back it up – so I think I see more problems with cloud based system.
Diederik: I live out in the country and we have terrible internet, really slow and so I could not use cloud based anything out there.
I have asked all the questions. Do you Andrew have anything of a general nature that you think that you would like to share in this event about Practice management software?
Andrew: I think the most important thing that we haven’t touched on yet, really is Support.
All software systems they all need a degree of support, Microsoft have got thousands of highly paid engineers and they still get all these glitches. So most of these glitches are fixed by training.
With your PMS, if something goes wrong you need to get it fixed quickly and without unreasonable cost.
I think the biggest problem we see in people’s clinic are printer issues. Printers are always doing something strange and they are always difficult to setup. If you don’t know what you are doing or if there’s a printer issue, then it’s very easy for us to just dial into your system and set it up for you.
It can be very expensive if you need to talk to someone and you’re paying several hundreds of dollars per hour for support.
Some PMS you have to buy 3 hour lumps of support in advance and if they use a minute of each hour, that counts as an hour.
With us, maintenance/support is $1300 per year which includes upgrade and updates and support.
Some systems don’t include the extra for upgrades and you need to pay for them. If you need an upgrade every 2 months, that becomes expensive. I think it’s very important to get good support and it’s got to be cost effective for you, so it can’t be expensive and it’s got to be quick because when your system goes down you need it up and running very fast.
Basically the system needs to be easy to run as we have said and it’s got to have all the cost upfront.
We charge a one-off license fee however other PMS – some charge an annual license fee which can make it very expensive as well.
You just also need to make sure you have got a well-established firm which is going to provide you due support and make sure it’s easy to use and it does everything that you need. And you also need to know that the developers and support term are going to be there for the next 10 or 20 years and not just disappear on you.
Diederik: A couple of things came into my mind as you were talking…
This support because I have been and with my business hat on and I have been in the game a fair while and I work with practices all over the world and I hear so many stories of crap support and horror stories again and again. And look there are certain systems that seems to in gender more support issues than others…I’d stay away from those systems and companies.
And the 2nd question I want to hammer again with people who are watching; there is no point of buying a system with all the bells and whistles if you are not going to use it!
If you are going to use it, then go for it.
But it’s stupid to have all this unused capacity if you pay for it and don’t use it.
If you are going to use it great.
But I would say only one out of every 500or 600 practices uses more that 20% percent of their software capacity.
The marketing things we have talked about that’s where the power is and that’s what you need to use.
Also, if your PMS has 1000 reports – that’s a waste. I only need half a dozen to run a practice profitably, so a handful is all I want.
Andrew: Clinic Ware has been running for 10 years so we have all the reports that we’ve found that people use. If somebody wants something specialized, then we can set it up for them. I can’t remember the last time someone asked for that or for anything that isn’t already there.
Diederik: That is really a nice thing to do. I haven’t heard of anyone willing to customize or design a special report for a single user so that’s awfully nice.
Andrew: Usually there is another way of doing this thing that a client wants – as you might know.
If somebody comes up with a great idea, somebody the other day came up with a good idea, then we immediately implement it.
Vets are on the front line and if they come with an idea that is going to help everyone else, as long as they tell us about it we will implement it.
We are big enough to provide a proper system and we are small enough to be approachable. We are moving with the times and that’s to do with having a proper team.
Diederik: Just one last question, as you know, I’m trying to keep this as generic as I can, just being very specific about Clinic Ware now, in which countries have you got your system?
Andrew: Initially we set up in Australia, so we have the bulk of our clinics in Australia. We have got a lot in Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong, there are a few in the USA, Holland, and in the UK.
It’s a system that is applicable anywhere, it just needs to be customized just in certain place, we can do that no problem at all.
For example, you can use Chinese characters and numbers or Arabic.
Wherever you are, things just need to be customized a little and we do that for you. We are happy to deal with clinics everywhere and they tell us their needs and we try to make that happen.
Diederik: Andrew, I think we just hit the 30-minute mark.
Andrew: I hope we have helped some people with some ideas on what to do especially with those marketing ideas.
Diederik: Yes, cool. And thank you very much I appreciate your time and I will let you know when we put this all together and it’s going out.
Andrew: Great, thanks very much.Diederik: Thanks Andrew