IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/midasp/347405.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Veterinary Professional Associate Financial Model: Specialty Practice

Author

Listed:
  • Lloyd, James W., DVM, PhD
  • Harris, Donna L., DVM, MBA, MS
  • Smith, David M., PhD

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Lloyd, James W., DVM, PhD & Harris, Donna L., DVM, MBA, MS & Smith, David M., PhD, 2024. "The Veterinary Professional Associate Financial Model: Specialty Practice," Staff Paper Series 347405, Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:midasp:347405
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.347405
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/347405/files/VPA%20REPORT_specialty%20practice_MSU%20Staff%20Paper2_Reference%20no.%201099-2024-1352.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.347405?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:midasp:347405. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/damsuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.