Don’t you wish you had a machine in your practice that printed money? Well – you do!
An Ultrasound machine used on every equine lameness case will increase the cash flow of your business by $150-600 per case depending on how you decide to price it.
If you do 4 call-outs per day you’ll earn an extra $600-$2400 per day. Which means, if you perform 20 lameness exams per week, you have the potential to make an extra $10,000 per week – just by using what you already have in the practice… Ultrasound! There’s also the added information you’ll have available to you from the diagnostics. It’s a win-win situation.
Let’s take a more conservative approach of 10 lameness exams per fortnight. This can still equate to an extra $2500 per week you were not earning before. Of course, this is conservative but imaging if your practice was seeing a high caseload of lameness exams with 10 scans a day?!… Wouldn’t that be dreamy?
Why would someone charge $150 for the scan when another person would charge $600? It’s a bit like tooth extractions. Here are three reasons:
Firstly – How do you value yourself as a professional service provider?
Do you have the skills to use your money maker and are those skills at a novice level? Or have you practiced them with a specialist under controlled conditions so you are confident they are strong, efficient and diagnostic?
Secondly – What are you scanning?
We all know there are laypersons out there offering all sorts of services. Anyone can buy an ultrasound machine and make it work for them. The machine might be good or not. They might have the skills, they might not. It’s an annoying reality of animal care these days. Lots of people spruiking without acceptable credentials. However, very few people have the training to scan accurately, to achieve better diagnostic results. But you can. You are a vet. You have the greatest and broadest capacity to give the best results for horse owners. Don’t doubt yourself. Others may know how to perform a direct perpendicular scan of the Suspensory Ligament. But they will not know what they are looking at with an oblique approach. They probably won’t scan the whole structure either. Nor would they have the background knowledge in anatomy and physiology which vets have to make good clinical judgments and provide prognostic and treatment advice for recovery. Others certainly don’t have the medical knowledge either. And those vet skills and techniques are worth charging for. But you can’t use all those skills if you haven’t got good diagnostics. And it’s well known that ultrasound, when applied properly, can give almost good results as MRI in a lot of common cases, AND it requires less anaesthesia and stuffing around (transport) of the patient. That’s worth paying for. Ultrasound is also a great monitoring tool for healing and can be used on repeat consultations to immediately judge the progress of a patient.
On top of that – Scanning a spine or Shoulder or Hip or even parts of the foot is a bucket load harder than scanning the superficial digital flexor tendon. So those anatomical differences might carry a loading fee to accommodate the time and skills required.
Thirdly – Do you have clientele and live in a demographic where price matters?
Realistically some of us can make bigger margins on our services because the demographics of our market allows for it.
So if you have an ultrasound machine sitting in your hospital and you aren’t using it on every lameness case you might be selling yourself short. Don’t sell yourself short! VetPrac has organised the worlds best lameness ultrasound workshop for equine practitioners this year on July 4-5 and 6-7th.
Register HERE for ‘Distal Limbs‘ July 4-5.
Register HERE for ‘Proximal Limbs and Spine‘ July 6-7.
CLICK HERE to download the brochure about these workshops.
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