Business models of the French veterinary offices in rural areas and regulation of veterinary drug delivery.
Business model
Drug delivery
Profitability
Veterinary offices
Journal
Preventive veterinary medicine
ISSN: 1873-1716
Titre abrégé: Prev Vet Med
Pays: Netherlands
ID NLM: 8217463
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
01 Dec 2019
01 Dec 2019
Historique:
received:
16
03
2019
revised:
08
10
2019
accepted:
08
10
2019
pubmed:
5
11
2019
medline:
16
1
2020
entrez:
5
11
2019
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
French veterinarians are authorised to both prescribe and deliver drugs. This situation of conflict of interest is sometimes denounced as a potential source of over-prescription and overuse of veterinary antimicrobials, even if no evidence is available up to now. This leads to regular calls for separating prescription from drug delivery, even if the consequences of such separation are unknown. The present work aims at describing the business model of French veterinary offices and the expected impact of separation on those offices. A dataset of 15 million observations was built with structural and accounting data collected for the period 2015-2017 from French mixed veterinary offices. Results of the baseline scenario indicate that veterinary offices' profit generated from farm animal activities is mainly driven by drug delivery (about 70%), while profit from companion animal activities is mainly driven by medical acts (i.e., consultation and advice, surgery, and laboratory analysis) and sale of accessory products (about 65%). The net margin rate is higher than 25% for all activities, except for material selling. If drug delivery or sales associated with a medical act (same day, same client, and same animal) do not require additional human resources (alternative scenario), the net margin is reduced for medical acts. For both scenarios, a high variability is observed between veterinary offices. This shows that the profit of each activity is highly driven by time spent on the activities. Our results suggest that, in the case of restrictions on drug delivery by veterinarians, their profit may dramatically decrease, especially for farm animal practitioners and those with low medical acts profitability. Further work is needed to account for the high diversity of situations faced by veterinary offices and the sensitivity of their profitability to production costs.
Identifiants
pubmed: 31683187
pii: S0167-5877(19)30173-4
doi: 10.1016/j.prevetmed.2019.104804
pii:
doi:
Substances chimiques
Veterinary Drugs
0
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
104804Informations de copyright
Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.