AAHA Yearly Conference

I love conferences! If I had infinite funds and time, I would attend them all! I listened to a great lecture at the AVMA Conference in 2011 on reptiles even though I have never worked at a hospital that treats them, nor do I personally own any. That is how eagerly geeked out I get about conferences.

I believe that AAHA conferences provide the some of the best quality management CE of any of the conferences. They have tons of management and tremendous speakers.

This year AAHA was conveniently located in Phoenix where I have an apartment (It's a long story). This meant the cost of the conference and the gasoline to fill my truck was about the extent of my investment. You can't improve on that.

So, some highlights:

Veterinarians are terrible about looking at and examining our finacials. Pay attention to trends on your financials. Examine your different revenue centers for winners and losers. "Money is emotional" so we need to divest ourselves of that baggage when we look at it.

In Touch Practice Communications with Jessica Vogelsong (pawcurious.com): Great tips on engaging pet owners through social media - ask questions, post contests, join forces with local media (radio) to assemble a pet video collection. In-hospital photos of pets (don't forget your release forms!) Tell them that you are posting the picture.

This talk had tremendous value and great suggestions. If you see her name on any conference that you're attending, I strongly suggest you listen to her. I am a note taker, and I filled three pages on her talk alone.

Other tips and tricks from the conference (bear with me, I'm still in that giddy, "Lets change the world!" post conference high).

Don't use the following words: basically (offends the listener), appointment (you avoid appointments, but you like to visit), Office policy (this is cold and shows a lack of ownership, use 'we believe' instead), use can instead of can't. Always try to create a positive outcome.

Before and after pictures for dentals (yep, they're still talking about it, and you're probably still not doing it). You don't even have to buy a camera. Use a cell phone, email the pictures to the clinic email and assemble them in Word. It takes 10 minutes.

Google+, which almost no one uses and no one is on and is ultimately largely useless, is Google's baby, and they will reward your site with higher visibility if you use it. So use it and link your site and blog and FB page to it as well.

People engage with veterinarians on FB, but we're not there, and when we are there, we don't post enough. Post often, post photos (which are high value) vs links (which are low).

Veterinarians who are otherwise evidence based still believe that their clients are all about price. They are not. Staff is usually more price sensitive than clients. Clients rarely have any clue what anything costs year in and year out, staff does, and they 'marry' that price.

Sx should be at minimum $500 an hour - yeah, chew on that one!.

Here's a partial list of speakers who I listened to: Debbie Boone, Bill Schroeder, Jan Bellows and Paul Camilo, Marsh Heinke, Darren Osborne, Dr. Demian Dressler.

Optimism bias

There was a terrific conversation on NPR last week about something called the Optimism Bias. This bias has been studied by neuroscientists and it's effects are hindering efforts to stem the tide of obesity in American children.

Here is the article and transcript of the NPR interview with science correspondent Shankar Vedantam about research conducted by Tali Sharot and others. The research shows that when it comes to negative outcomes we will raise our perceived odds of avoiding that outcome, even in the face of facts that contradict our position.

What does this have to do with veterinary medicine and your practice? Everything. The article (in a nutshell) discusses how people underestimate their chances and their family's odds of getting sick, even if all the evidence contradicts their stance.

This is why smokers continue to smoke and our client's pets remain obese in spite of our efforts to educate them about the dangers. After listening to the conversation on NPR, I went into the hospital where I am working and I put "optimism Bias" on the agenda for the next staff meeting.

The upshot of the research is that all of our efforts to tell people the negative effects of certain actions or inactions fall on deaf ears, because all of the bad things will not happen to them. If you read off a litany of bad things that can happen to a pet that isn't vaccinated, or isn't on heartworm prevention, or has to lose weight, people think, "Wow, that sounds bad, I mean my pet is fine, but all those other people need to protect their pets."

Tali's recommendation on how to outwit this bias is not to dwell on negative outcomes, but to dwell on the positive effects that can occur. In the case of obesity (our biggest battles in human and pet health), instead of focusing on the negative aspects of what can happen, discuss the great things their pet will do if it loses weight. It can play like a kitten again, or chase frisbees, or go hiking with the grandkids. Create a positive outcome worth striving for as opposed to a negative outcome to avoid.

It's easy to see how this can work with something like obesity, but it is harder to address things like vaccines or heartworm prevention. But, spending some time with your team looking at the various ways that positive outcomes can be created through owner compliance will not only help you better communicate with your clients, but will help your staff remain flexible in how ideas are presented.

 The book by  Tali Sharot on her work: The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

Thank you for reading. You can follow 4 Dogs Veterinary Services on Twitter @4dogsvet. Call us for all of your veterinary management needs.

4Dogs Veterinary Services

Have you ever tried to get four dogs to hold still and face the same direction for a photograph? Never mind looking at the photographer or not panting, just gazing in more or less the same direction? Well, it's not easy.

Sometimes it seems like you only have one good dog

I had a herding dog instructor who got a fantastic photo of his 6 (extremely well trained) border collies all arrayed on bales of hay. It was a gorgeous shot. Then he told me that they had spent three hours trying to get the shot before resorting to using baling twine to tie all the collies to their allotted bale, and then after fifty or sixty (thankfully) digital shots later, they got the shot.

Running a veterinary hospital (or a household, or your life) is a lot like trying to herd dogs (or, yikes! Cats!). There are so many variables always in play, and everyone seems to always be heading in different directions. You have employee drama and client drama, and sick pet drama, and that is all before lunch!

The point of this blog is to try to help you remember why you're in this business. Whether you're a team leader, office manager, hospital manager or an owner, it's lonely at the top. The goal of this blog is to make it a little less so.

Well at least I've got four dogs in the frame...

Veterinary medicine is a tough business. We expect perfection from ourselves (or at least should) and demand it from our staff (right? You do that, right?). But here's a horrible factoid: no one's perfect. And every day from the moment when we open the hospital doors to the second our head hits the pillow at night, we are reminded of that.

We are reminded of that when we forget to thank employees for their great work, or decide to blow off poor behavior because, well, time just got away from us, and there's always tomorrow. We are reminded when we forget that we are professionals and gossip is destructive to morale, but what we're saying now, that isn't exactly gossip, is it?

Three out of four isn't bad - actually, if you look real hard you can see Ketchum's nose.

We're all running around all day trying to put fires out, helping people on the phone and dealing with a dying cat in the back. We're trying to explain for the umpteenth time to the technician that urine in the lobby is her job, and to the receptionist that guessing what is wrong with the pet over the phone is not.

And we're trying to do it all while doing a cost benefit analysis of adding a new digital dental x-ray unit versus an ultrasound machine, versus firing everyone and opening a frozen yogurt stand instead.

Success!!

Well, don't start looking at yogurt stands yet, because just like herding my dang dogs all over my property to take a photo of all four together wasn't easy - it's not impossible either. And when all is said and done, when you go home at night, hopefully some of the truth of why we all do this filters through... It really is for the dogs (and horses, and geckos, and cats, and whatever creatures you helped out today).

The point of this blog and the point of 4Dogs Veterinary Services is to help us all remember why we are here, and make our efforts to achieve those goals just a tad bit easier.