The Growing Importance of Pets and Veterinary Care

For millions of Americans, pets have become integral parts of their family in recent years, particularly since the pandemic. A Pew Research Center survey highlights this trend, showing that 62% of American households now include pets, with 97% of pet owners considering them part of the family. As a pet parent, ensuring my boys get the best care possible is a top priority, and I am not alone. There has been a significant rise in the demand for veterinary care, presenting staffing challenges and opportunities for veterinary hospitals.

The Challenge: Staff Turnover and Increased Demand

Veterinary hospitals face high staff turnover rates, with about 25% of Doctors of Veterinary Medicine (DVMs) and veterinary technicians changing jobs annually. This shortage often results in extended appointment wait times and limited care availability, exacerbating staff burnout and attrition. Veterinary hospitals are thus seeking innovative strategies to meet growing demands and improve staff retention and efficiency.

Despite high staff turnover rates, delivering top-notch care with a compassionate veterinary team remains the goal. Pet care clinics are turning to Legion Workforce Management (WFM) to help them manage staffing and provide the best care possible.

Legion’s Solution

What if you could take a plan and automatically create a schedule based on the doctors’ and hospitals’ needs that also considers how many patients need to be seen while ensuring labor costs don’t negatively impact gross revenues or, more importantly, the quality of care provided? With Legion, you can! Legion Workforce Management Software enables intelligent automation to help pet care providers maximize labor efficiency and engagement simultaneously.

Maximizing Labor Efficiency

Legion offers an AI-driven approach to optimize vet hours per patient while achieving key performance indicators (KPIs) such as annual revenue targets per DVM and client engagement. Legion WFM includes advanced demand forecasting and enables intelligent automation, creating optimal staffing plans that balance the needs of doctors, hospitals, and patients.

• Automatically match staff and clinic needs with AI-driven forecasting and Labor Optimization: Legion’s AI and machine learning capabilities offer advanced demand forecasting, which is crucial for the diverse and dynamic emergency pet care environment. Predict how many doctors, technicians, and front office staff are needed for each location and automatically create the optimal staffing plan that matches employee skills and preferences with clinic needs.
• Schedule the best employee for the job with automated, optimized scheduling: Legion’s Automated Scheduling identifies available staff for shifts, ensuring the best fit for open shifts. Legion automatically matches business needs with employee skills and preferences to instantly create optimized schedules.
• Minimize compliance risk: Automatically factor in state, local, and federal compliance rules to ensure schedules align with compliance laws.

Fill in Coverage Gaps with Flexibility

Legion’s technology enables veterinary clinics to balance the needs of various staff members, from vets to front desk staff, by optimizing workforce allocation across locations. This approach helps cover peak periods efficiently, avoids overtime, and enhances service quality for pets and their families.

• Increase coverage across states and locations: Employees indicate the locations where they can work, and scheduling automatically fills coverage gaps while meeting all compliance requirements. Legion WFM’s multi-location optimization process automatically assigns employees across locations based on business needs and employee skills and preferences.
• Enhanced emergency response: Rapidly identify and automatically assign the right doctors for emergencies.

Increasing Employee Retention and Engagement

Vet clinic employees play a crucial part in making a difference in the lives of our pets. Employee experience is at the heart of retaining employees so they can deliver compassionate, quality pet care.

With Automated Scheduling, employees can share their preferences on when, how much, and where they work. They can easily access their schedules, request changes, pick up shifts at other locations, swap shifts, receive and respond to open shift requests, and request time off in the Legion mobile app.

Legion also supports employee financial wellness through features like Legion InstantPay, which helps reduce financial stress for employees by providing immediate access to earned wages through the same mobile app they use daily.

• Empower employees: Gig-like flexibility is automatically delivered. Give employees more control with automated self-service shift swaps and shift claims and the ability to define when, how much, and where they want to work and update their preferences anytime.
• Intuitive, highly adopted app: Loved by employees, our intuitive, modern app is highly adopted by our customers and has a 4.8 rating in the app store.
• Encourage engagement: Share kudos, build corporate culture, and empower employees with direct updates from management with modern employee communications.
• Reduce avoidable attrition: Check in regularly with employees through polls and surveys that gather real-time feedback on employee satisfaction.

With the power of modern technology and the adoption of Legion Workforce Management, pet care providers can transform operations and improve the employee experience across their entire network while ensuring the pets we love so much get the care they need when needed!

Learn more about how this emergency vet provider and national pet hospital conglomerate are solving their challenges with Legion. Want to chat about how Legion can help you? Schedule a demo today.