Veterinary practices want pet owners to say yes to recommended preventive care, but even when clients understand the importance of that care, cost and uncertainty about future expenses often get in the way.
Michelle Ferretti from Nest Veterinary sat down with Vetcelerator to explain how pet wellness plans encourage consistent care and create more predictable recurring revenue for veterinary clinics.
Veterinary Wellness Plans Make Preventive Care More Predictable
According to research provided by Nest Veterinary, 52% of pet owners say cost is the number one reason they decline recommended care.
Over the course of a year, pets need exams, vaccinations, diagnostic testing, dental care, and other services recommended by their veterinarian. For pet owners, understanding what’s coming (and budgeting for it) can be difficult.
What so many pet parents are looking for is some predictability and reassurance of what's going to happen next.
Pet wellness plans solve this problem. Rather than encountering the cost of preventive services individually once per year, pet owners spread the cost of planned care over time.
Pet Owners Want a Clear Payment Structure
Nest’s research reinforces that predicitabilty need. Among 3,583 pet owners surveyed at signup in 2025, the top three reasons for choosing a plan were:
- Saving on healthcare costs
- Having a plan for their pet’s healthcare
- Spreading healthcare costs over time
In other words, clients aren’t necessarily looking for the biggest upfront discount. They’re looking for a clearer way to plan for their pet’s care. This distinction matters because it changes what a veterinary wellness plan needs to accomplish.
Does Your Practice Have to Discount Services? Not With Wellness Plans
Wellness plans are sometimes created in a clinic by bundling a collection of services together at a significant discount, but aggressive discounting causes problems for veterinary practices that already have limited room to reduce the price of their services.
Michelle sees an opportunity to approach the value proposition differently. A wellness plan gives pet owners something they value without requiring the practice to compete primarily on price: predictability.
With veterinary wellness plans:
- Clients know what preventive care is recommended.
- They have a clearer idea of what it will cost.
- They can incorporate that expense into their monthly budget rather than facing higher individual costs throughout the year.
Practices can still choose to offer additional perks. Depending on the hospital, that might include unlimited nail trims, a small discount on sick exams, or another benefit that rewards plan membership.
The goal, however, should be making it easier for pet owners to plan for and say ‘yes’ to the veterinary care their pets need.
For that approach to work, the care itself also needs to make sense for the individual veterinary practice and patient.
Wellness Plans Should Align With the Veterinary Practice's Standard of Care
Every veterinary hospital practices medicine a little differently. When Nest partners with a veterinary hospital, plans are decided upon based on that practice’s existing standard of care, using established AAHA guidelines as a reference. Pet wellness plans become another way for clients to access the preventive care the veterinary team already recommends.
Customizing Care Down to the Individual Pet
Nest customizes plans beyond broad categories such as an adult dog or cat. A pre-selected bundled package may include a service that a particular pet doesn’t need that year. If access to monthly payments requires purchasing the entire bundle anyway, some of the value of personalization is lost.
Wellness plans have to align with the medicine that the clinic would want to be practicing already, and this is a tool to make it easier for pet parents to say "yes" to that care.
Alignment makes it easier for veterinary teams to recommend a pet wellness plan because the conversation is now simply another way for pet owners to access the care the veterinarian is already recommending.
How to Implement Wellness Plans at a Veterinary Clinic
A wellness plan is unlikely to have its greatest impact if clients rarely hear about it. The strongest results occur when plans become part of how the veterinary practice routinely discusses preventive care, rather than something offered selectively to certain clients.
Instead of deciding which clients appear likely to want or afford a plan, veterinary teams can introduce the option as a normal part of the preventive care conversation and have the plans featured on their website. Over time, those conversations become shorter and more natural because the team becomes comfortable explaining how the plans work.
Veterinary clinics should make wellness care plans “part of the DNA of that practice.”
Of course, getting an entire team comfortable having those conversations requires more than simply turning the program on.
How to Increase Wellness Plan Sign-ups
Even a well-designed veterinary wellness plan needs to be communicated clearly. For veterinary teams, that means understanding how the program works and how to explain its value without turning every preventive care conversation into a sales pitch.
Nest supports participating practices with team training covering the technical aspects of using the platform as well as best practices for discussing care plans with pet owners.
Make Pet Owners Aware of Wellness Plans Before an Appointment
Nest provides participating practices with marketing support that can include pre-appointment communications, email communications, website materials, and print and digital resources. Pet owners will learn about wellness plans before they’re sitting in an exam room making decisions about their pet’s care.
Marketing introduces prospective clients to the practice in a different way. A pet owner researching veterinary hospitals can see how the practice supports budgeting for ongoing preventive care. Once a pet owner enrolls, that relationship becomes more significant than a single appointment.
Wellness Plans Strengthen Long-Term Client Relationships
A veterinary practice needs clients who continue returning and following through with recommended care. Wellness plans naturally create a longer-term relationship because they are based around care delivered over time rather than a single transaction.
Roughly one-third of pets enrolling in a Nest care plan do so during their first visit to the veterinary practice.
For veterinary practices, that type of ongoing engagement supports continuity of care while creating more predictable recurring revenue. For pet owners, it creates an established framework for what their pet’s preventive care may look like over the coming year.
The combination of greater predictability for the client and a more consistent relationship with the practice is where wellness plans create value for both sides.
While that doesn’t prove the care plan caused the client to choose the hospital, it does show that new clients are receptive to establishing a longer-term care relationship from the beginning. Nest’s research also reports that having plans available increases the number of visits and 87% of pet owners on its plans renew annually.
There is, of course, another side of wellness plans that matters to practice owners just as much as client adoption: administration.
Don’t Wellness Plans Create More Work for Veterinary Teams?
The benefits of a wellness program can quickly become less appealing if managing it creates a significant administrative burden. Credit cards expire. Payments get declined. Clients change payment methods. If the veterinary practice becomes responsible for tracking down missed payments, a wellness plan program intended to improve the client experience can create additional work for an already busy front desk.
Nest Veterinary manages payment follow-up and communication when a client’s payment doesn’t go through, removing that responsibility from the veterinary practice.
Reducing the Financial Risk of Missed Payments
Nest has introduced a 100% payment guarantee to address another concern practices may have about wellness plans.
If a veterinary practice has already provided covered services worth more than the client has paid into the plan and Nest Veterinary cannot recover subsequent payments from the pet owner, Nest covers the eligible unpaid amount for services already rendered under its payment guarantee.
Their 100% payment guarantee shifts a significant administrative and financial concern away from the hospital. The practice can focus on delivering care rather than asking its team to become a collections department for the wellness program.
A veterinary wellness plan should ultimately make preventive veterinary care easier instead of introducing a complicated process for the practice or the pet owner.
Making It Easier for Pet Owners to Say “Yes” to Preventive Care
Wellness plans at a veterinary practice mean more consistent preventive care conversations, stronger client relationships, recurring revenue, and a way to reduce cost-related barriers without relying on aggressive discounting.
Through Vetcelerator’s partnership with Nest Veterinary, veterinary practice owners can explore how customized care plans might fit their existing standards of care and the needs of their clients. When pet owners have a clearer path to saying yes, practices have a greater opportunity to provide the preventive care they already believe their patients should receive.
If you are interested in implementing Nest at your practice, talk to Vetcelerator about becoming a GPO member for special pricing.
Watch the Full Interview
About Michelle Ferretti and Nest Veterinary
My name’s Michelle with Nest Veterinary. I serve as Senior Director of Strategic Accounts, and really that’s just a fancy term for ‘I get to make sure our partners are having a great experience as they partner with us.’ That’s my goal.
Nest is a care plan partner. Our goal is to help veterinary hospitals make every pet’s preventative care accessible and make it easier for pet parents to say yes to the care that pet hospitals are recommending to them.
