What Are Aftercare Calls Costing Your Veterinary Clinic?
Your team spends time on aftercare every day, but how much? Between medication questions, recovery updates, and calls about discharge instructions, it can be hard to tell. Care Connect makes it easy to log those follow-ups and see why clients are reaching out, how the workload changes, and what it may be costing your clinic.
Log the follow-up. Care Connect handles the reporting.
After a call, email, text message, or in-person conversation, your team easily logs the follow-up in just a few clicks:
As your team records follow-ups, Care Connect brings the results together for you: how many follow-ups the clinic handled, why clients needed help, what happened next, and how the workload changed over time:
Understand the time and cost involved
Set the estimated time per follow-up and the hourly costs that fit your clinic. Care Connect uses those values to calculate estimated time and labor cost across the recorded follow-ups.
For example, 100 follow-ups averaging five minutes of staff time at $24 per hour, plus one minute of veterinarian time at $60 per hour, represent 10 estimated hours and $300 in estimated labor cost.
These estimates help put the workload in context. For a quick estimate before you start tracking, try the aftercare cost calculator.
Start with two weeks of follow-ups
Use your first two weeks in Care Connect to get a picture of your clinic's workload. Agree on which aftercare follow-ups to log, record each one once, and keep the approach consistent across the team. Include care questions and recovery check-ins; leave unrelated booking or administrative questions out.
After two weeks, review the dashboard for recurring reasons and choose one part of your discharge process to improve. The report reflects what your team logs, so check for recording gaps and unusually busy or quiet weeks before interpreting the results.
Turn follow-up patterns into useful changes
If medication clarification comes up repeatedly, review how the schedule is presented. If clients often ask where to find their instructions, check how the discharge is delivered and explained at checkout. If planned check-ins dominate the workload, review how the team schedules and records them.
A recovery concern may be exactly the follow-up you want an owner to make. Preserve clear instructions for when to contact the clinic, and assess the reasons and outcomes alongside the volume.
For practical discharge changes, see our guide to reducing after-visit phone calls. Clear instructions and reminders can support owners, while recovery visibility helps the team decide who needs attention.
Start your free two-week trial to bring follow-up logging and reporting into one place, understand your clinic's estimated workload, and find your first opportunity to improve aftercare.
To learn more about Care Connect, see the demo here: Care Connect demo.