Anonymous case study B
Recovering revenue with a smart veterinary billing assistant
Providing a billing assistant for veterinary staff; reducing misbilling and adding extra revenue to the bottom line.
We were introduced to the senior management of a large veterinary group, who recognized that they had a problem with inconsistent customer billing. They saw that it was losing them substantial revenue and felt it was unfair on those customers who were paying more than others.
They were using the Provet Cloud practice management system, for which Sweetfish is an official partner with an approved integration. This made it straight-forward for them to grant us access to view and analyze a comprehensive set of historic billing data.
Assessing the scale of the problem
Their business intelligence (BI) team had some clear ideas about where they expected to observe the worst inconsistencies and missed revenue, so we started by configuring Sweetfish to investigate those areas and evaluate the actual amounts being lost.
The system identified dozens of specific products and procedures which were hotspots of misbilling. In each case we worked with senior veterinarians to consider how often they would reasonably expect a colleague to apply their professional judgement and depart from the established protocol. Based on this assessment we established benchmarks, or target compliance levels, for each.
Taking into account the benchmark levels, we calculated that in those focus areas alone, they were losing around 10% of revenue to misbilling.
Assisting with correct billing
To start recovering some of that revenue they decided to implement Sweetfish as a billing assistant for their veterinary staff. Working entirely within their Provet Cloud PMS, Sweetfish would monitor every consultation and make timely suggestions for products or services which seemed to be missing.
Although Sweetfish can be configured to enforce compliance, they felt that it would fit their organizational culture better if staff had the option to ignore its recommendations.
We started a pilot, rolling out Sweetfish to a selected group of clinics with a reduced set of checks and suggestions. Sweetfish runs entirely within Provet Cloud and is very intuitive to use, so staff required minimal briefing to start using it.
Rolling out nationwide
They found that the majority of veterinarians welcomed the suggestions from Sweetfish and were able to quickly add missing products and services to customer bills.
As a result, they are now starting to roll it out more widely across the entire group.
