Overview
Boondall Veterinary Surgery has been operating in their local area since the late 1970s. The practice has three vets on staff, as well as a team of five veterinary nurses. They are a small animal general practice.
In 2001, the practice moved to their current purpose-built premises, where they provide veterinary services in Boondall, its surrounding suburbs, and other suburbs north of Brisbane.
A modern solution needed for business continuity
The shift to their new location and premises in 2001 was part of a drive to modernise the clinic and offer leading patient and customer outcomes. Dr Darryl Bates, lead veterinarian and owner of Boondall Vet Surgery, says he and his team were using an outdated server-based system and they needed to move to a modern practice management solution (PMS) to secure their data and ensure business continuity.
“My concern was that, if anything were to go wrong, we would be in trouble,” he explains. Darryl and his team were used to using an offsite hosted solution accessed via remote desktop, so it was an easy and logical step to move to a cloud-based PMS.
“I was familiar with web-based programs, as well as the Covetrus veterinary software, so that made Covetrus Ascend appealing,” he says.
Smooth onboarding due to great support
One of Darryl’s key considerations for choosing a new practice management solution was that the switchover from their current system to a new system needed to smooth for his team. “Covetrus offered good support around conversion, which made it an easy choice,” he adds.
“Ours was a specialist conversion,” he explains, “so overall it took a bit longer than expected. However, it was never a concern that it was taking longer, as we were working on it constantly and I don’t think it could have been done any quicker.”
Darryl says that the Covetrus team were on hand to support him and his team with training after the conversion had been completed, saying “it went really, really well.”
He and his team are also very pleased with the Covetrus tech support team, who were on hand to help them as they moved to Covetrus Ascend.
Seamless adoption of Covetrus Ascend
Once the conversion and training had been done, Darryl and his team found Ascend easy to integrate with their clinic workflows. It’s designed to be easy to use, remove operational clinic chaos, and improve team collaboration and wellbeing. “The vet nurses have picked up using Ascend just fine,” says Darryl. “Everything has gone great!”
A feature of Covetrus Ascend that the Boondall Veterinary Clinic team have enjoyed in particular has been the ease of billing – particularly the use of bundles. “When a pup comes in for a vaccination, for example, I just pull up the vaccination bundle that we’ve created and away we go,” Darryl explains. “That’s been really, really good.”
“The inventory management is also working well for us,” he adds. “It’s still early days, but we’ve managed to get all the ordering coming through fine. This week, there were just two items I had to load. One was a brand new item which wasn’t in the system and the other was an item that we used to order, and we deactivated and had to reactivate.”
Healthy return on investment, including practice efficiencies
Darryl says he’s very happy with the return on investment he’s getting from Covetrus Ascend, particularly when compared with what he was paying to have his server managed offsite previously.
“The cost of Ascend is very competitive,” he adds.
While it took the usual amount of time to bed the new PMS in at Boondall Vet Surgery, Darryl and his team have noticed they’re now gaining efficiencies across their practice. “For example, it’s not taking anywhere near as long to fill in patient information like heart rate, respiration, demeanour, and other details,” he explains.
“With returning patients, we’re enjoying being able to access information from previous visits right away, without having to go back and physically look at the previous record. While it takes a bit of time to learn the system, once you’ve got it down pat it works really well.”
Darryl also enjoys the way Ascend records key patient data in a standardised table. “Everyone usually records information a bit differently,” he says. “With the standardised table, you know immediately where to look to get the key information from previous records.” This creates efficiencies and time savings for his practice.
Final thoughts
Summing up his and his team’s experience with implementing Covetrus Ascend, Darryl says they are extremely satisfied with the move to their new practice management solution. “Everyone is really, really happy and none of us are upset with any of the changes,” he adds.
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