The Veterinary Professional Associate Financial Model: Specialty Practice

The U.S. veterinary medical profession is facing a capacity crisis, struggling to meet the growing demand for services. Introducing a new mid-level provider role, the Veterinary Professional Associate (VPA), could bridge the gap between veterinarians and technicians, potentially helping to alleviate this issue. This project aimed to define potential VPA roles and responsibilities and assess their impact on workflow, productivity, and financial performance in a specialty orthopedic practice for companion animals. Based on expert interviews, we developed partial budget models to estimate the expected financial impact of VPAs. Under our model assumptions, adding one full-time equivalent (FTE) VPA significantly improved financial performance and increased throughput. These findings suggest that VPAs could be a viable solution to help address the capacity issues in veterinary medicine. Similar to successful implementations of physician assistants and nurse practitioners in human medicine, VPAs may enhance practice capacity and client satisfaction, improve patient outcomes and animal welfare, and increase practice profitability. Further research and real-world implementation are needed to validate these results and ensure the successful integration of VPAs into veterinary care.