Operational Efficiency - why it’s going to be the watchword of 2024
Jeff Bezos’s ambition is to make space cheaper, he believes this is the only way to make real progress. As he explained in his recent interview with Lex Fridman, Amazon could only exist because the infrastructure (the internet, the card processing systems) already existed making it cheap enough for him to develop the innovative new Amazon with limited resources. He now wants to build the infrastructure in space so that a whole new wave of innovation can follow.
In a different stratosphere, this year I’ve spoken to hundreds of veterinary professionals and managers all over the world and in all types of practices and the key problem for all of them is time. There is often a surplus in demand and not enough vets and nurses to service it. And as the workload goes up, other problems kick in - people get sick, or they burn out, or they just leave, creating a vicious cycle.
Alongside this the veterinary industry has suffered from the impact of inflation with costs increasing rapidly - we saw the effect of this in heavy rounds of redundancies in the corporate sector, and pricing increases across the industry for veterinary clients.
This combination of too much demand, too little availability and increasing costs is why there’s been a big, recent focus within the industry on operational efficiency: i.e. doing more work in less time.
Improved operational efficiency makes vet care cheaper to deliver, this can sound off-putting in the veterinary world, we are after all talking about delivering health care to our precious pet family members, and cost cutting is to many synonymous with cutting corners. However we believe that using technology to make vet care cheaper actually results in better care delivered by practitioners with time to breathe and reflect, and as per Jef'f’s reasoning on making space travel cheaper, maybe this results in a wave of innovation and new possibilities in veterinary care.
A slew of ‘Technology-first’ venture-backed vet practices have appeared, the core principle being to use digital efficiencies to maintain a higher number of active clients per vet, transforming the economics of veterinary practice. The sums of money involved here give an idea as to the scale of the opportunity many outside our industry see here - Modern Animal’s total money raised recently hit $89M.
Over the course of next year my team and I will be sharing ideas on how to use technology to make operational efficiency improvements in your practice. Of course we think that Digital Practice, our WhatsApp messaging platform, is going to be a big part of the change. Our ambition is to digitise client communications which accounts for a substantial amount of vet team time. Our foundation stone is our multi-channel approach, clients can contact the practice via WhatsApp, sms or Facebook making it highly inclusive, we believe this is the only credible way to achieve digitisation of client communications on a scale that impacts operational efficacy meaningfully.
Want to know how Digital Practice can help? Get in touch for a demonstration!
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