Insights from Stephanie Goss, Founder of VetMedLife, and Shawna Castillo, Otto’s Director of Care

If your clinic’s schedule has felt a little lighter lately, you’re not imagining it.

Across veterinary medicine, teams are seeing more delayed preventive care, fewer follow-through appointments, and more treatment plans that stall out after the estimate. But during Otto’s recent webinar, How to Drive More Appointments with Affordable Care Options, Stephanie Goss and Shawna Castillo challenged the idea that clinics simply have an appointment problem.

As Stephanie put it, “We don’t have an appointment problem. We have a yes problem.”

That line set the tone for the whole conversation. Clients still want care for their pets. The challenge is that for many of them, the path to saying yes feels harder than it used to.

One of the biggest themes from the webinar was that slower appointment volume is often less about demand and more about accessibility. Rising costs, financial stress, and uncertainty around payment options can all make it harder for clients to move forward with care, even when they want to.

Stephanie summed it up well, “I don’t think that actually is representative of a demand problem. We still have clients who want to come in the door.”

That shift in thinking matters because it changes the solution. Instead of only asking how to fill the schedule, clinics may need to ask a different question: What is making it harder for clients to say yes right now?

Another major takeaway was that affordability is not just about the total on the invoice. It is also about predictability, flexibility, and whether clients feel safe having the conversation in the first place.

As Stephanie said, “The clients require flexibility, and they want convenience.”

Steph and Shawna explored how emotional factors like overwhelm, shame, and fear of judgment can be just as important as the actual cost of care. They also talked through what modern clients expect from the buying experience and why that expectation now extends to veterinary medicine too.

Another clear takeaway from the webinar was that client expectations have changed. Pet owners are used to subscriptions, split payments, digital convenience, and a smoother buying experience in almost every other part of their lives. Veterinary medicine is not exempt from that shift.

That means one payment option or one financial conversation at the end of the visit is often not enough. Clinics may need to think more broadly about how they offer flexibility, communicate costs, and make care feel more manageable before the client is under pressure.

Steph and Shawna also touched on something many clinics know but do not always operationalize: if the first time a client hears about payment support is when they are staring at a large estimate, it may already be too late.

A big takeaway from the webinar was the importance of normalizing these conversations earlier, whether that means discussing payment options proactively, educating clients about care plans before illness happens, or giving team members the language to talk about money without awkwardness or shame.

Rather than framing affordable care as discounting, the webinar focused on practical ways clinics can create more paths to yes. That included ideas like proactive payment conversations, clearer communication, care plans, and other tools that help clients plan for care instead of making every decision in the moment.

One of the strongest moments came when the conversation turned to client financing and assumptions around who will or will not follow through. As Steph put it, “Bad credit does not equal a bad client.”

Shawna also shared how structured care options can help clients commit to care earlier and come in more consistently over time. She noted, “Clients are telling us, we want the care for our pet, we just have to figure out how to pay for it.”

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