Veterinary Vertex
Veterinary Vertex is a weekly podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the clinical and research discoveries published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) and the American Journal of Veterinary Research (AJVR). Tune in to learn about cutting-edge veterinary research and gain in-depth insights you won’t find anywhere else. Come away with knowledge you can put to use in your own practice – along with a healthy dose of inspiration to remind you what you love about veterinary medicine.
Veterinary Vertex
Boosting Veterinary Client Engagement with Benefit-Focused Communication
Have you ever wondered why your clients might not be engaging with your veterinary clinic's preventative services? Join us as we uncover insights with our guests, Drs. Kat Sutherland and Jason Coe, who explore the transformative power of benefit-focused communication in veterinary practices. Drawing from their enlightening research in a recent JAVMA article, Kat and Jason reveal how emphasizing the benefits, rather than just the features, of preventative care can significantly boost client engagement. Learn how to tailor your communication strategies effectively to bridge the gap between how veterinarians and clients perceive value, ultimately enhancing the way services are communicated online and in-person.
This episode dives into the evolving landscape of human interaction, especially within the realms of veterinary practice and education. Kat and Jason discuss the integration of AI in communication, and how it's reshaping educational methodologies and veterinary client interactions. Discover actionable strategies for improving client communication, with a focus on ensuring clients are empowered and informed about the value of preventative services. Whether you're a veterinary professional aiming to enhance client relations or simply curious about veterinarian-client communication, this episode promises to inspire new approaches and insights.
JAVMA article: https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.24.09.0568
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You're listening to Veterinary Vertex, a podcast of the AVMA Journals. In this episode, we chat about how veterinary clients prefer online communication that is benefit-focused, while clinic websites uncommonly communicate benefits of preventative care services with our guests Kat Sutherland and Jason Coe.
Lisa Fortier:Welcome to Veterinary Vertex. I'm Editor-in-Chief Lisa Fortier. Today we have repeat offenders Kat and Jason joining us. You guys, thanks so much. We learn so much from you every time you're on our podcast and we greatly appreciate you taking time out of your day to be here with us.
Jason Coe:Thanks for having us back.
Kat Sutherland:Good to be here again.
Sarah Wright:All right, let's dive right in to learn about your latest JAVMA article, Jason. Your JAVMA article discusses how veterinary clients prefer online communication that is benefit-focused, while clinic websites uncommonly communicate benefits of preventative care services. Please share with our listeners the background on this article.
Jason Coe:Yeah, and that's an interesting question as I reflect on it in terms of the root, of where this work has come from. And I think really, if I think back, it started 20 years ago when I first did some focus group work with pet owners as well as veterinarians, exploring their expectations of veterinary care, and through that work we were able to identify this potential gap in how pet owners or clients perceive value and how we as veterinary professionals perceive value, where clients in those focus groups always talked about in the context of how's this going to benefit the health and well-being of my pet, where many veterinarians would talk about in the context of the time, the service, the things that we could offer. And so we took those learnings and we've done a few studies now where we've looked at the verbal conversation happening between a veterinarian and a client in the examination room and looked at how veterinarians are framing the communication around value, and what we find is oftentimes the value is linked to the time, the service, the product that we as veterinary professionals offer. Sometimes we get some functional information and on what kind of information that will provide us as a veterinary professional or how that works. And yet there's an opportunity there to explore what or communicate really how it's going to benefit the health and well-being of the animal, and there have been several studies since we did that original work that has highlighted that for many clients really, at the end of the day, what they want to understand is how is this going to benefit the health and well-being of their animal?
Jason Coe:And so more recently, the research team that we worked with on this project was very interested in looking at online communication, and we recognized that there had already been some work done to looking at reading ease in terms of reading level of content that was online, and we thought, building on that, what can we offer? And I had this real interest in looking. Well, if we know this is important in conversations between veterinary professionals and clients, we should probably look and see how are we framing information, particularly as it relates to value, on websites, and so we did this study to better understand what clients were looking for when we're communicating in a written form, to build on the work that we had done looking at how we communicate through a verbal form. So that's kind of the root and background of this project. It's really about the why right in terms of answering that question.
Sarah Wright:You got it. So, Kat, what are important take-home messages from this JAVMA article?
Kat Sutherland:For sure.
Kat Sutherland:So I think there's a few.
Kat Sutherland:The first is that our participating clients in the survey portion of the study did indicate that they would be more likely to speak to a veterinarian about the preventive care service that we were asking about, which was senior screening in this case, when they saw a paragraph that really emphasized the benefits of that service for their pet, compared to a paragraph that focused more on the functions of the service and the information that we get from it.
Kat Sutherland:The other piece was the website component of the study where, similar to what Jason was talking about, that we've seen an observational work in the exam room the website clinic or the clinic websites, really framed the value of the preventive care services that they offered around the features, so what it is that is available to clients, and they talked a little bit about the function and the information that they get from that, what they can do with it.
Kat Sutherland:But there's opportunities that we see to further discuss and highlight the benefits, as we were saying, to the client as well as the patient, from those services. And I think the last piece was the reading level of those websites was much higher on average than what's recommended for publicly facing health information. So, I think it's great if clients are accessing that content and readability is certainly not the end-all, be-all of accessibility of content, but it's a starting point to consider. If they're engaging with it and it's not matching up with what they're looking for or something doesn't make sense, it's not super accessible to them, they may end up going elsewhere on the internet for that information and kind of undermine the benefits that they could get from looking at a vet clinic website in the first place.
Lisa Fortier:All really good points, Kat. You know, one of the things serving on IACUC was that client consent forms should be written at the level of eighth grade, and that sounds insulting. And then we throw in medical language on top of it. So, I think that's a really really good point. You know, hire professionals to do this for you. Don't try and do it as a veterinary team, because we don't speak the same language.
Kat Sutherland:And it's hard, you know. We realize that too in designing the study. It's hard to get it down to that reading level. And it's not about dumbing it down, it's how do we create a match here and align with what clients need and make it accessible and engaging.
Lisa Fortier:Yeah, engaging is important too. You guys are the poster children for how to build on a study, and then you had that idea, and then that spawned to that idea. So what's the next step for research in this topic?
Kat Sutherland:I think there's a couple of things. So I mean, we would love to do a field study where we go out and actually start to look at adherence. Which is really sort of what we're ultimately hoping to get at with this kind of work is how can we frame these recommendations so that clients are going to actually act on them and pets are going to receive that important preventive care?
Kat Sutherland:So, going into practices and testing out some different ways of communicating the value of services and seeing how that impacts client behavior would be really important, and Jason can perhaps speak to this, but there's also a lot of work going on around decision making more broadly and how there's various tools that professionals might be able to use with their clients to aid decision making as well. That, I think, would build on this nicely.
Jason Coe:I think that's the next step is taking this into practice, and I think that's where we see a lot of this in our work is we explore an idea or identify an idea. We kind of test it through some surveys, see what is happening in practice with observational studies, and then move in with what happens when we actually do this. Now, those take some careful consideration as we build those and, as Kat mentioned, we're doing a few different things now, including decision-making. So it'd be interesting to be able to look at how is something communicated online? Does that lead a client and a veterinary professional to have a conversation around that topic? And then how do we support that topic once the conversation is happening? And so now you're putting together a series of steps to lead to that outcome of adherence and likely is going to impact both the veterinary professional satisfaction and the client satisfaction as an outcome of that interaction. So I think there's a lot that we can always do, which is always why it's fun.
Lisa Fortier:Yeah, I'm really curious. Maybe stick with you, Jason, on this next question as a client, as a personal client of things like JCrew and online banking and those sorts of things, websites for Delta, whatever it is what role do you see for AI in this specific area of research?
Jason Coe:Yeah, that's probably the million dollar question right now in terms of the role of AI. And you know, when I think about in the context of this work, I think of two ideas. One is this work specifically, and so in the paper we do talk a little bit and, Lisa, you mentioned earlier, you know the target is trying to write health information according to the American Medical Association at sort of that grade six level and so accessing professionals to support getting that content in a way that's going to be accessible for a broad population of individuals. I think that also could be a place where we see AI fitting in and helping veterinary professionals take the content we have and how can we re-sort of, factor it into a reading level that might be more accessible to a broader population? You raise AI and you know it's used everywhere.
Jason Coe:I think that's it is happening so fast.
Jason Coe:It's going to happen so fast and I think that our work looking at more of the human side, the human factors associated with veterinary medicine.
Jason Coe:We can't sit still.
Jason Coe:We need to really understand how AI is going to fit into veterinary practice, how it's going to support, as well as influence, the relationship that veterinary professionals have with their clients, and so I do think, as this changes, and I expect over the next five years, parts of veterinary medicine will look very different than they have the last 15 to 20 to 30 years because of AI and advances in technology, and that has potential positive as well as things we need to be aware of impacts on the relationship we have with our clients, and so I do see that some of our work is moving towards understanding AI and just how receptive people are, and then I think there's a lot of questions around it in terms of if you were to craft an online message through AI versus someone who, as a veterinary professional, has crafted that, is there an impact, or how do people perceive that right In terms of some of that?
Jason Coe:So I think AI just opens so many questions and there's so much work that the area that we're involved with needs to do and keep up. Keeping up will be the challenge, given how fast things are changing.
Lisa Fortier:If listeners didn't pick up on it. Jason said it's sixth- grade level. I think I said eighth grade earlier and I like what Kat said. Like come to a common ground. We're not trying to dumb down language, but if you have information in your client consent form or on your website, it should be at sixth grade level. And, Jason or Kat, I wrote an editorial using AI one time and it did read like a sixth or seventh grader. It was perfect grammatically, but it was. It just didn't have a swing and a nuance of a more seasoned person. If you tried AI, do you think it could write? Do you think you could, as a veterinarian, take it from your language and get it sixth-grade a level with AI? Can you tell? I've never tried it. Can you tell AI write this sixth-grade a level?
Jason Coe:So, I personally have not, and however sort of some of the idea that came to me in terms of incorporating this into our paper is that I know clinicians that are using it to potentially do that.
Jason Coe:I think one of the things that we always have to keep in mind is the open access nature of AI, particularly around client confidentiality, and so what we're putting in especially if it's like a discharge statement or something like that to get it to a level that a client might be suitable for a client, we really have to kind of keep that in the back of our mind.
Jason Coe:I now, as an educator too, are constantly thinking about AI, and you know, I know some of the things I would like students not to use AI for, because I want them to develop their own skills, but I'm also challenged to think about where are some of the opportunities to utilize AI, and so one of the assignments in my course was writing a discharge statement this year where I shared with the students. They were welcome to use AI. Although similar to JAVMA and your disclosures on manuscripts, they needed to make a disclosure as to where and how they used AI when referencing the use of AI, and so I think we're at a time where we're really finding the landscape and how we can use it and how it impacts and to your point, Lisa AI, I don't think can be left to stand on its own and some of these things we still want to kind of read through and add to it and change it because it will. We're using it as our sort of output. It's a reflection of us as a professional and we want it to reflect what we want it to in that way.
Sarah Wright:Super interesting.
Sarah Wright:I will definitely look forward to your future studies. Sounds like maybe we can even explore the use of AI in veterinary communication. So we will see. And to our listeners. For those of you just joining us, we're discussing how veterinary clients prefer online communication that is, benefit focused, while clinic websites uncommonly communicate benefits of preventative care services with our guests Kat and Jason. So now a little bit more on a personal note. Jason, how did your training or previous work prepare you to conduct this study?
Jason Coe:Yeah, that's a great question, and so I've been looking at the area of the human elements of veterinary practice and how relationships in veterinary practice impact outcomes for the last 20 years and so I think a lot of that is over time built tools to kind of think about how we look at more of the social side of veterinary medicine which has really led us to this place.
Jason Coe:As I mentioned earlier, you know, this work really is the culmination of 20 years where we first discovered this gap and how clients were talking about value of veterinary care, always talking about the benefit or how would that impact the health and well-being of their animal and veterinarians very much focusing more on the time and service that they were able to offer, recognizing both of those have a lot of value, and so really have been able to take that and build on our learnings and it's amazing over the 20 years even how my thoughts and ideas have evolved.
Jason Coe:I think very early on I was very focused on needing to support communication by really highlighting just the benefits, and yet even this study drew attention to the fact that it's not all just benefits for all clients. It really is a combination of understanding what is it can we offer? How does that work and then what are the benefits associated with that? And so I think, even through that evolution, it is the learning over time and putting those puzzle pieces together that really creates an understanding, and I imagine we will do another study that will continue to expand and mold and adapt our understanding, which is the exciting part to this. Human interactions are always evolving. There'll never be like this fits all situations, and I think that's what gets me excited about the work that we do, Kat and I, on a daily basis.
Sarah Wright:Very cool, thanks for sharing. So now this next set of questions is going to be very important for our listeners. Kat, what is one piece of information the veterinarian should know about, how veterinary clients prefer online communication that is benefit-focused, while clinic websites uncommonly communicate benefits of preventative care services?
Kat Sutherland:Yeah. So I think what really stands out to me is that there's such an actionable opportunity here for veterinary teams to consider how they're communicating value to their clients. And you know, assessing their practice websites is one starting point. Looking at what you have out there, that's client facing, where are you discussing features, functions, benefits and how can you enhance some of that discussion to align with clients' perception of value? But it's also about the consistency in all of the communication with clients, both in appointments and outside of them. So thinking about how you can raise awareness for all of the team members about the importance of having a message that promotes the benefits of preventive care for pets and where that can be used you know, in the exam room, at the front desk, in your client handouts and all those other opportunities that exist for client education where the whole team can really support that message about value for these services that are so important to pets in a way that's meaningful for clients and more likely to get them engaged with their vet team.
Sarah Wright:And then on the other side of the relationship, Jason, what's one thing clients should know about how veterinary clients prefer online communication that is benefit-focused, while clinic websites uncommonly communicate benefits of preventative care services.
Jason Coe:Yeah, it's a really interesting question, Sarah, and I appreciate you challenging me, because when we wrote this and did the study, it was really about how do we support veterinary professionals. And as I start to sort of shift the perspective of how can clients use this work, I think the thing that comes out for me is just this reinforcement of benefits and how important it is for clients. And yet our work would suggest that there are lots of opportunities for us as veterinary professionals, whether it be through our verbal communication, whether it be through our online communication, to enhance our benefits. And so what I would say for clients taking a message away from this work is that, given that for many clients, you're interested in understanding the benefits, if that conversation isn't happening or you don't see that information available online, I'd really encourage you to ask for that information, because it's there, it's available, it's just maybe we're not fully connected to get that information into your hands. And, given that it is so important, I'd really empower clients to see this as something that they can also be asking and seeking through their interactions with veterinary professionals.
Lisa Fortier:Yeah, such great information. You guys. We can always be better communicators, yeah, so thank you. As we wind down, as you know from your other appearances on the podcast, we like to add a kind of fun question. So we'll start with Kat and ask you if you could have a superpower, what would it be and why?
Kat Sutherland:It's a good question. I spent so much time thinking about this. I think I landed on telekinesis. Just would be really practical, could be helpful for myself and other people out in the world, and think that I would be responsible with it and not harm anyone. So that seemed to be a key factor as well.
Lisa Fortier:That would be a good one, Jason. How about you?
Jason Coe:So I had to think carefully on this as well, and I think, at the end of the day, selective mind reading would be what I would choose, and the reason being that Kat and I do a lot of simulated work with students, with veterinary professionals, utilizing simulated clients, and one of the tools we have in our availability is what we call client voice, where we can get inside the mind of that client in that moment. It's so powerful, and yet we can't always do that in our day-to-day interactions, and so I use the word selective, because I wouldn't want to be one of those superheroes walking around hearing everybody's thoughts and ideas all the time. Yet at times, I think there's a lot of value to truly understand what's going on for someone else, so that we can properly support and even communicate with them.
Lisa Fortier:Imagine how useful that would have been with a newborn.
Jason Coe:There you go.
Lisa Fortier:I know you're trying to communicate and I'm trying to listen, but I just don't know what you need. Please stop crying.
Sarah Wright:Yeah, Jason, would that extend to animals too?
Jason Coe:I think, yeah, I mean, why not? That would be helpful as well, right? So yeah.
Sarah Wright:Very cool.
Sarah Wright:Well, thank you both for being here today and for sharing your work, as always, with JAVMA. We really appreciate it.
Jason Coe:Awesome. Thanks again for having us.
Kat Sutherland:Great to chat with you, thanks again
Sarah Wright:To our listeners you can read Kat and Jason's article on JAVMA. I'm Sarah Wright with Lisa Fortier. Be on the lookout for next week's episode and don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen to.
