Veterinary Offices Need an IT Asset Management Solution

“As technological improvements continue to advance the level of care veterinarians can provide, affordability and accessibility have allowed more widespread integration into smaller practices,” says Covetrus, a global animal health technology, and services company.

IT: Saving Lives, Keeping Offices Running Smoothly

Why would a veterinary practice need an IT asset management solution? IT is the lifeline of any busy practice, giving vets the ability to perform life-saving procedures, tracking patient records, and integrating various business functions. Technology keeps the practice running smoothly, saves time and can potentially boost productivity and quality of care. It helps the practice maintain communication with pet owners, reminding them of their pets’ treatments and appointments. In short, IT is creating better practices and raising the bar on patients’ quality of life.

Should any of those IT fixed assets malfunction, a vet office’s ability to communicate with families may be impacted. Employee productivity may be negatively affected. Safety breaches may occur. Expensive equipment may be lost or stolen, which in turn cuts into bottom-line revenue. Most importantly, the quality of patient care may be jeopardized. Routine maintenance is essential for keeping operations moving at their optimum capacity.

Any piece of equipment must be routinely inspected to ensure that it’s running properly. However, in no other industry is that more vital than in healthcare. Patients often don’t have the luxury of time to wait while veterinarians and assistants search for the necessary equipment or diagnose a technical issue. The less time staff have to deal with these unnecessary issues, the more time they can spend with patients and families.

A Centralized Hub for Your Data

An IT asset management solution provides a centralized location for all of a veterinary practice’s IT asset data. Rather than spending time looking through the office for a particular asset, staff can pinpoint the exact location of an item within seconds, along with details on its condition and maintenance history, warranty, and insurance policy. Office managers may use an IT asset management solution to track depreciation for accounting and compliance purposes and eliminate guesswork. They may also set up customized notifications and alerts to remind them of routine maintenance, so they never let it fall through the cracks. Should an IT asset require maintenance, employees can create work orders through the IT asset management solution and monitor the status of those orders.

Profits Matter

Although the patients they serve are their highest priority, profits are a close second for any veterinary practice. An IT asset management solution can help curb and even eliminate waste. “Poor tracking and management of assets can be a sinkhole of wasted expenditures … a centralized IT asset management system should be able to give accurate visibility into whether aging assets need to be retired. In some cases, asset costs can far exceed their ROI or their depreciation value,” said Phil Richards, Chief Security Officer of Ivanti, a Utah-based IT software company, in an article for scmagazine.

To grow a viable business, business owners have to conduct IT asset audits and determine where their hard-earned dollars are going. Paying insurance on ghost assets, ordering assets they already have in their inventory, and losing track of fixed assets all result from poor IT management practices. An IT asset management solution can establish transparency, accountability, and accuracy, maximize the lifespan of these investments, and reserve limited resources for what matters most: advancing medical diagnostics and providing the highest level of patient care.

Asset Panda’s mobile IT asset management solution simplifies the complex task of IT asset tracking. Our free customizable app lets veterinary practices track their IT assets any way they want.