While veterinary teams are busy taking care of patients, who’s looking after the health of their practices? AAHA Benchmarking, a new automated platform from the American Animal Hospital Association, promises to make it easier to do both, by helping teams lose the endless spreadsheets and focus on what they truly love.

When asked what benefits they want most from their AAHA membership, members continuously rank ‘access to practice key performance indicators (KPIs)’ as a leading request.  In response, AAHA teamed up with Petabyte Technology to deliver it. 

AAHA Benchmarking aggregates data from individual practices with other practices’ data to provide live feeds and advanced benchmarking analytics. That means practices will have real-time access to information that can save time, increase revenue, and support better medicine — all while spotting potential issues before they escalate into bigger problems.

What’s benchmarking?

"In order to make decisions that have the most impact on clinical care and operational performance, hospitals must regularly access and evaluate key data through benchmarking,” said AAHA Board of Directors 2022 President P. Adam Hechko, DVM.

The association thinks this data is so valuable, that it’s giving away access to the base-level product (Benchmarking Lite) for free to all AAHA members, thanks in part to support from Merck Animal Health.

This free Benchmarking Lite access includes a daily view of KPIs through 16 SPOTlight reports:

• Sales revenue: sales revenue summary, transaction growth, average client transaction (ACT), ACT growth, ACT deviation
• Producer performance: producer sales revenue and transaction growth, producer ACT growth and deviation
• Opportunities: new client transactions, forward booking rate, client bonding rate, client compliance rate
• Trends in medicine: patient visit transactions, average annual patient visit count, well-check appointment types, recheck visits

Personalize it with PIMS

For the data nerds who want to go even deeper and see how their own practice is measuring up in real time, there is an option to upgrade to Benchmarking+, which connects to the practice’s PIMS and provides a live-data view. Results can be filtered by additional criteria, like practice performance percentiles and producers.

The practice’s PIMS talks to the AAHA Benchmarking platform with a simple, secure application download. The technology does the rest.  In a matter of minutes, a dashboard is generated, giving the practice a bird’s-eye view of how they are doing. And, it updates daily. 

The mighty mechanics are grounded in AAHA Problem and Diagnosis Terms and significantly enhanced by Petabyte’s innovative technology.  The result provides an easy and impressive way to diagnose the health of a veterinary business.

Because cyber security is always a concern, AAHA’s leadership provides third-party neutral assurance that data is kept safe, secure, and ultimately owned at the practice level.

Ready to set some meaningful goals using real-time data? AAHA Benchmarking is worth checking out. Schedule a tour of the new AAHA Benchmarking tool, and learn more at aaha.org/benchmarking.