Not alone on an island: How Provet Cloud helped rescue a new practice

"Provet Cloud goes further than I ever imagined when we started."

Gæludýraklíníkin (GDK), a small but fast-growing veterinary clinic in Reykjavik, Iceland, realized not long after it opened that its practice management system wasn’t meeting expectations. Then practice manager Kristín Sigmarsdóttir discovered Provet Cloud and found all the time-saving, client-friendly features they were missing.

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“I can’t do this. This is going to make me quit.”

The head nurse at Gæludýraklíníkin (GDK) had lost her patience with their practice management system.

Although the practice had opened only a few months earlier, GDK’s practice manager Kristín Sigmarsdóttir quickly recognized that an important change needed to be made.

Launched in July 2021, GDK sought to create a better experience for pet owners. Most other clinics in Reykjavik were overcrowded and wait times had grown too long, creating a stressful environment for clients and staff. Designing GDK’s space meant dividing the reception area into two sections – dogs on one side, cats on the other – and painting the walls in calming colors.

“We felt we needed to create a place where people and pets feel like they’re in a safe zone,” Kristín says.

The practice quickly attracted many clients, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. But behind the scenes, an ineffective practice management system was making it harder for staff to maintain the level of service they wanted to provide, so Kristín began the search for a better solution.

"Provet Cloud had everything we were looking for."

Following a friend’s suggestion to check out Provet Cloud, Kristín was impressed right away with the cloud-based software’s sleek front-end design and user-friendliness. Even something as simple as having a photo of the patient on each patient record, she says, “would make interaction with the client so much nicer.”

The decision to go with Provet Cloud was easy, even though Kristín wasn’t immediately convinced that implementation of the new system required focused training. But she soon realized the value of the weekly scheduled onboarding sessions.

“How the training was structured was superb. It gave us the chance to try out the system and find the thresholds that were problematic for us, so that by the time we went live, we had already encountered most obstacles and could find a way to work around them.”

"What used to take me 15 minutes to do, now only takes 1-2 minutes."

Kristín is quick to name the features in Provet Cloud that have created efficiency, saved money, reduced stress, and delighted the staff at GDK.

• Powerful search bar
  “The search bar gives us endless opportunities,” she says. Advanced search capabilities make it easy to look up product inventory, whether by brand name or a generic term like “toothpaste.” And patients can be located by entering the pet name, client name, or microchip number.
  
  In fact, a microchip search may have performed a small miracle. One day, a new client walked in with a stray cat they had found at their vacation home hundreds of kilometers away. When the veterinarian examining the cat discovered its microchip, she entered the number into Provet Cloud…and learned that the cat was already a patient! GDK then contacted the cat’s original owner, who said they had lost their pet not far from where it had been found.
  
  “This would never have happened with our old system,” Kristín says.
• Client feedback tools
  A post-visit email sent through Provet Cloud to the client might include discharge instructions and an invoice. It also has a smiley face button at the bottom – a friendly invitation to leave feedback for the practice.
  
  GDK’s clients have gladly made use of the tool, and it has created smiles among the staff. “I get to tell my staff how well we’re doing and how happy people are,” Kristín says. “And clients love that they are able to leave feedback. Provet Cloud makes it easy.”
• Robust accounting
  “Everything about accounting is just amazing,” Kristín says.
  
  Retrieving and sending important information like end-of-day reports or monthly unpaid bills is done in just a few clicks.
  
  In addition to the money that digital invoicing has saved GDK on printing and paper costs, it’s significantly easier for staff to generate and send invoices to clients.
  
  One of GDK’s clients is a volunteer-led cat rescue organization. “They don’t have time to put in hours every month to go through invoices,” says Kristín. Provet Cloud allows her to batch invoices in one document and summarize in a quickly consumable list, and they can pay their bill with minimal hassle.
  
  And the same head nurse who was fed up with the previous practice management system, and who often creates invoices for clients, says, “What used to take me 15 minutes to do, now only takes 1-2 minutes.”

"I'm just so grateful that we found Provet Cloud."

As GDK continues to accept new clients and grow at a rapid pace, Kristín expects that within a year they will expand their clinical staff even further.

She has every confidence that Provet Cloud and its Support team will help her navigate the demands of growth – even though GDK is “alone on this tiny island.”

Kristín laughs, remembering that a colleague had warned her not to buy practice software “from abroad” because, she was told, “contacting somebody for help would be impossible…and nobody would care about us.”

With Provet Cloud, that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Everything, with every person we’ve spoken to, has been very personal communication,” she says.