Description
Affordability is the single greatest barrier to veterinary care today. Costs are rising, visits are declining, and more than half of pet owners skipped or declined recommended care in the last year. The traditional pay-at-the-time-of-service model no longer sustains practices or meets client needs, and those financial decisions directly affect patient outcomes.
A wide range of financial tools now exists to help owners afford care: preventive care planning, pet insurance, wellness plans, credit-based financing, managed payment plans, charitable grants, and subsidized care programs. The challenge is not knowing what is available, it is knowing how these tools work together in practice.
This session introduces financial triage as a structured, team-based approach to quickly identify a client's financial constraints and match them with a feasible care plan and payment pathway, without compromising empathy, medical quality, or trust. Attendees will learn how to build a funding stack across four categories, plan differently for healthy versus sick pets, and equip every team member, from the front desk to the treatment area, to present options with confidence. The goal is simple: move more cases from declined to delivered.
Learning Objectives
- Explore the current landscape of veterinary care costs and why cost continues to be the number one barrier to care for clients.
- Recognize how repeated cases of limited client finances contribute to moral distress and burnout among veterinary team members.
- Describe the range of financial tools available to practices, including preventive care planning, pet insurance, wellness plans, credit-based financing, managed payment plans, charitable funds, and subsidized care programs.
- Apply a financial triage framework to match medically appropriate treatment options with feasible payment pathways in the exam room.
- Create a plan to train team members on financial triage and improve their comfort with initiating and leading financial conversations.
- Differentiate the financial planning approach for healthy pets from the approach required once illness or injury has occurred.
