After lots of planning, strategizing, and idea sharing, we finally did it! The newest version of our Practice Overview Report (POR) officially launched in January. Those of you who have received it appreciated an updated, easier-to-read look, more data to help identify areas of opportunity to grow your practice, and benchmarks to see how you compare to all our VetSuccess member practices. There’s more where that came from, as we have a list of data points and appendices that we will be adding down the road to make this report even better!
Several people noticed that some of the numbers varied slightly from their old report to the new one, particularly in client and patient counts, and reached out to us to learn more. I asked our Data Analyst Extraordinaire, Will, for more details. What I learned is that the new POR is actually more accurate because of the way many of the numbers are tallied. This is certainly not to say that the old report was inaccurate. We generate our reports based on the data that we receive directly from your practice software. What our amazing team of data analysts found, through extensive research and testing, is that sometimes the data we get from you may have some flaws. The new report is designed to identify some of these common data flaws, and correct for them, before we deliver your report.
First though, it’s important to realize that we are pulling data from more than 20 different practice software programs, and not one of them functions the same as another. This means that the general data we receive from every practice is about the same, but how you have it set up, and how your system qualifies clients and patients as active or inactive, may differ from others.
Here are a couple of examples of how we filter out flawed data:
Previously we calculated active patients by looking at all the patients that had a transaction in your practice within the last 18 months, and were marked as alive and active. Sounds simple, right? Not really. We found that many practices have patients marked as active, without an associated active client account. We believe counting these patients doesn’t accurately reflect the active patient base of your practice, as patients are unlikely to come in on their own without their pet parent to pay the bill. Now we exclude patients that are not also associated with an active client.
A second example: Patients that have a date of death listed, but have not been marked officially deceased in your system. Our filters will now see that this patient is deceased, and will count it as such, even if your PIMS does not specify that it is.
These are just a couple of examples to illustrate how we are working harder so you can work smarter. If you haven’t seen our new Practice Overview Report, you are missing out! Check out the short videos below to learn more about this awesome tool. It will help you to monitor your practice’s vitals, just as you monitor your patients.
