Sheila Grosdidier

With veterinary care becoming more complex each day—more services, more decisions, and higher expectations—you may feel stretched pretty thin trying to survive the hectic days. Repeat these words: It doesn't have to be this way.

With some planning, you can manage clients' visits and maximize their experiences at your practice. Here are five simple strategies to tame the wait time, revolutionize the reception area, and manage all the craziness.

If clients bring books or packed lunches to their appointments, you have a problem. Don't kid yourself—your clients aren't addicted to multitasking. They're buried in their books because your team's buried in backlog. To solve this setback, you need to pinpoint your gridlock.

Start by recording how long each segment of a visit takes, rather than just the time that elapses from when clients arrive to when they leave. Jot down the time check-in is complete. Then note when a team member greets and escorts the client and pet to the exam room, and so on. Do this for every patient for at least a week to determine the various wait times on various days.

This may sound challenging, but with a team effort, it will be worth the extra time because you'll know where you need to improve. (Have you figured out that you need to streamline your wellness visits? Click on efficiency study under related readings for detailed instructions and free related forms.)

Schedule effectively

Quite often, long wait times and front-desk chaos are the end products of misaligned schedules. And with four schedules to juggle—appointments, surgeries, doctors, and team members—it's easy to see why. So how do you get the right alignment? By adjusting your staffing patterns to better handle peak times, especially the morning rush.

If mornings are a whirlwind at your practice, consider adding another team member to the early shift to facilitate the check-in process. When you staff to adequately support the client load, you'll no longer begin your day facing frenzied clients eager to drop off their pets and scurry to work. Instead, you'll be able to warmly welcome clients with, "We'll have you checked in and out the door in 15 minutes." Imagine having the time to talk to clients about the procedures their pets will be undergoing, review pain management protocols, and explain the value of your services.

Worried that doubling up on schedules will be too expensive? Many clinics say adding a team member during busy times increased the number of services sold, which offset the cost of extra wages. Seal the scheduling deal with this quick tip: Make a list of all the benefits an additional team member would bring to the practice, such as ensuring team members get breaks, improving productivity, providing time to better prepare for appointments, and increasing training opportunities. Odds are, your pros will outweigh your cons.

Emergencies can also wreck your practice's Zen. Meditate on this: Schedule emergency slots. Reserve one 20- or 30-minute emergency appointment for each block of appointments a veterinarian sees in a day. For example, if two doctors see appointments Monday morning from 9 to noon, you might mark out emergency slots at 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

It's unlikely that emergency patients will arrive at these exact times, but that's OK. By setting aside the extra minutes, you'll be able to catch up regardless of when emergencies happen. And if none happen, use the flex time to recover from appointments that ran too long.