Written by Rebecca McComas, DVM – Owner
In 2010, I started MN Pets, a home euthanasia practice in the Twin Cities, envisioning an flexible part-time job to stay busy when my children were in elementary school. Within a year, I saw this wasn’t going to be any sort of easy, part-time thing! The demands of operating a business and the local client demand for home euthanasia exceeded what I would be able to do on my own.
Though a bit scary and largely unfamiliar, I decided to hire other experienced veterinarians to help with appointments and compassionate social workers to help with answering our phones. We spent the next few years growing MN Pets and our team.
Then, in 2016, on the plane ride home from the annual IAAHPC conference, I had an epiphany. With a highly trained and supportive phone staff, as well as our scalable medical records computer system, I realized we could help other end-of-life colleagues by answering their phones, too.
We called this new branch of our practice ‘DVMcenter’, reflecting that it’s the central hub of client support for mobile end-of-life veterinarians.
My engineer spouse Jeff, who had always helped me with IT, marketing, and back-office support for MN Pets, decided to leave his corporate job at 3M to devote himself full-time to DVMcenter.
With Jeff and our veterinary social worker, Kristi Lehman’s, superb help as our Director of Operations, we’ve configured our team and processes to be able to successfully assist many other practices by answering their phones, scheduling their visits, and managing their calendar and medical records. We continually embrace the use of the latest phone and computer technology to grow our internal systems.
In keeping with our belief in the value of an interdisciplinary team, we’ve continued to grow, moving into our larger, newly remodeled office in 2017. Currently we have over 35 professionals on staff at both MN Pets and DVMcenter.
We are well-positioned to continue helping mobile, end-of-life practices with their client support needs from the east coast to the west coast and everything in between.
Rebecca has learned a lot from other mobile end-of-life providers through her involvement with IAAHPC Business Circles and helping DVMcenter member practices go through growing pains. It’s her greatest joy to hear from a member that DVMcenter has helped them reach that next stage of business growth successfully.