Sponsored Editorial

An Open Letter to the Equine Veterinary Profession

The past year has brought rapid-fire change to the industry. While you’ve been adapting to help horses and clients, we’ve been adapting to help you.

By Boo Larsen, General Manager and Vice President, Veterinary, CareCredit

FOR ME, IT ALL STARTED WITH PONY CLUB IN ENGLAND. I became inseparable from my horse, Flicka, and soon grew to love all things horse-related. In fact, I’ve spent much of my career in animal health dedicated to causes around horse health and welfare.

Many of you equine veterinary professionals could tell a similar story. I’ve known enough of you over the years to understand that your love for horses lights up the core of your being and has done so since you were young. Whether through riding club, 4-H involvement, growing up on a ranch or any of the innumerable paths that lead to equine obsession, you live and breathe horses in a way that’s unique among your colleagues in other segments of veterinary medicine.

Unfortunately, I also know that for too many of you, your passion is offset by struggle. You have sacrificed incredibly to do what you love. For one thing, you could easily make more money in small animal practice. And if you are a woman, the income gap is even greater. You recent graduates are likely to be carrying a large student debt load. And irrespective of age or gender, you have accepted the physical risks associated with working around thousand-pound beasts and given up huge chunks of personal time to serve horse owners in their hour and place of need.

Yes, there are moments of glorious reward, moments that remind you why you chose this profession in the first place. But for every wobbly new foal you deliver or soft look you get from a horse after relieving its pain, there’s a devastating diagnosis or treatment estimate to deliver that makes your client’s shoulders sag. We all recognize how frustrating it is when economics and emotion meet.

In fact, from my 15-plus years working with equine veterinarians, I would go so far as to say it’s highly likely that most of your frustrations and challenges are financial in nature. The business of equine practice is no picnic. Providing top-level medical care to huge animals is expensive—your own costs may be rising every year—but when these costs run up against a client’s limited ability to pay, your passion for the horse often wins out. This makes it all too easy to discount fees, give away services and otherwise limit your revenue. And this is simply not sustainable for your personal or professional financial health.

Let’s also talk about accounts receivable for a bit. How many management experts have you heard expound on the need to collect payment at the time of service? And how many of you have been able to successfully make this shift in your practice? From our research, it appears that this is still a challenge for the equine veterinary profession. Just as your medical tools and technology have evolved to meet your unique needs and challenges, your financial tools need to evolve as well.

At CareCredit, we want to be part of the solution. We have worked with about 85 percent of eligible veterinary practices to deliver a financial solution that has helped millions of pet owners pay for veterinary care, which in turn helps those practices deliver care.

And we want to do the same for you, the equine veterinarian. This is the moment where we declare our commitment going forward. We are stepping into the gap because we want to ease the financial pain points you experience on a daily basis. We are committed to getting it right by partnering with you in an unprecedented fashion. We will be supporting the things that make your lives better, and we will be communicating with you directly about financial solutions that can help you, your clients and your patients.

We want to keep you at the heart of equine care by bridging the gap between economics and emotion.

But our commitment extends beyond the transactional moment. Your relationship with your clients and patients involves a Lifetime of Care and collaboration, and the financial relationship is just as important as care of the horse. In fact, clients want a healthy financial relationship with you. They’re seeking options that empower them to provide care for their horse. And as your partner, we are dedicated to making that happen. We’re setting out to provide a level of support to the profession and ultimately the client in a way that reduces financial stress and helps provide greater access to horse care. We are here today to move forward in that commitment.

Ultimately, we believe a cultural shift is within reach—from “the way it’s always been” to “the way it should be.” We know CareCredit is not the silver bullet that will solve every problem you’ve ever had. But we hope that helping you reimagine what’s possible will lead to renewed excitement in your chosen career and a greater sense of wellbeing. And if we can help you change entrenched patterns (like sending invoices instead of collecting at the time of service), we think practice will be more fun again … and even a little more rewarding.

If there’s anything being in the veterinary industry has taught us at CareCredit, it’s that financial solutions can lessen the stress, frustration and heartbreak so common in practice. And that there is a way out of awkward and uncomfortable financial conversations. When horse owners are prepared with an option that helps them manage the cost of care—whether it’s a one-time bill for $5,000 or the $500 necessary for ongoing wellness needs—you can get to work. And you’re more likely to get to do the right thing for every horse, which is why you got into this field to begin with.

We want to keep you at the heart of equine care by bridging the gap between economics and emotion. This is how we make your care possible. Our journey together begins today.