Steal This Blueprint for Seeing 1.5x More Patients Per Day, with Chris Martin

Chaos is not in the job description of staff members in veterinary practices, yet most of the industry accepts that this is the way it always has been, and always will be. A frantic morning, phones ringing while staff funnel toward treatment, exam rooms stacking up while the front desk sits empty. Christopher Martin, operations manager at Hefner Road Animal Hospital and Pet Resort in Oklahoma, spent 22 years in human healthcare before walking into that chaos for the first time. His reaction was not sympathy. It was disbelief.

“In human medicine, everything is planned out pretty meticulously and there isn’t the chaos,” Martin told host Dana on a recent episode of Veterinary Best Practices. After nearly two years of applying human-health operational thinking to Hefner Road’s daily workflow, the clinic now books 18 to 19 patients on a typical day. When Martin and his wife Dr. Rebecca Martin, the clinic’s veterinarian, purchased the practice, a good day was 10 patients. He tracks that progress through Digitail, which lets him compare today’s schedule against the same day a year prior. Staff leave for lunch on time. Charts are complete before clients leave the building. On occasion, Martin and his wife walk out the door mid-day and sit down at a restaurant. “I’m not saying we’re going 10 miles away to a five-star restaurant and having a two-hour lunch,” he said, “but we can go down the street to Chili’s and sit down for 45 minutes and get our sanity back.”

Chaos in veterinary clinics is no longer an unavoidable side effect of caring too much, but a systems failure with a measurable cost. However, with the right technology and dedication to the cause, it’s an organizational mess that can be sorted out. Chris Martin covers how to get to the root of this chaos, and how to address it below.

The root of the chaos

The funneling problem is where Martin starts when he looks at a struggling clinic. Someone calls out sick, a difficult patient arrives in treatment, or an emergency intake comes through the door without warning. The entire team migrates toward the problem. Reception is empty. Exam rooms are unattended. The phone rings with no one to answer it.

Martin traces this to two connected problems: undertrained staff and an absence of defined roles. “We’ve interviewed vet assistants who could barely restrain an animal, who can’t draw blood,” he said. “They’d worked in clinics for several years and didn’t know how to do these things.” When a vet assistant can’t hold a fractious cat efficiently, that appointment takes twice as long. When the only person who knows how to run the therapeutic laser is Joanne, a client sits in the lobby for 30 extra minutes for a 10-minute treatment. Each delay is 5 minutes here, 8 minutes there, 12 minutes somewhere else. “All that adds up to two hours,” Martin said. “And having an extra hour and a half to two hours during your day is phenomenal.”

Staying in your lane is not a limitation

Hefner Road operates on a clear principle: everyone has a role, and the job is to stay in it. Reception does not leave the front desk unattended. Each care team is assigned to a room and a patient. When an emergency comes in, the SOP (built using Digitail’s AI) dictates who runs to treatment, who speaks to the owner, who communicates with operations, and who stays in their current room. The rhythm does not break.

“There needs to be a rhythm for how things work,” Martin said. “Otherwise, we see the chaos, we see the funneling, and we see the profitability go down because once we start getting out of our lane and doing stuff that isn’t our job, we’re working long past closing time.”

The practical test of that rhythm: when Martin attended VMX, he checked in three or four times throughout the day via Digitail’s cloud-based flow board, calendar, and payment screen, and was otherwise fully present at the conference. The clinic ran without him.

Cross-training is a retention strategy

The backup coverage benefit of cross-training is obvious. When an illness swept through Hefner Road and took out four or five staff members at once (Martin and his wife included), the clinic continued to function. A practice without cross-training in that situation would have shut down or crushed whoever remained.

The less obvious benefit is what cross-training does for the people who stay. Host Dana put it directly: “We have a bunch of intelligent, hungry people who want opportunities to grow in their role. Within the organizational chart of a hospital, there’s finite opportunities to do that.” Cross-training creates those opportunities. It also builds a fuller picture of the patient journey for every team member. A receptionist who has spent time as a vet assistant understands why a new puppy appointment takes 40 minutes. That awareness changes how they schedule, how they communicate with pet parents, and how they show up on the floor.

At Hefner Road, one receptionist works Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Wednesday afternoons, she becomes a vet assistant. Someone else covers reception. She learns new skills and earns more. Martin’s lead vet assistant, Riley, is now so well trained that she can run a full dental procedure independently (extractions aside) and is actively training a second vet assistant in scaling and anesthesia monitoring. “The training gets more buy-in,” Martin said. “She can run the dental by herself. And now she’s training another vet assistant.”

How AI creates time for everything else

The most common objection to any operational improvement in vet med is time. There is no time to train, no time to build SOPs, no time to rethink how the schedule runs. Martin has heard it countless times. His answer: AI is how you find the time.

Hefner Road uses Digitail’s AI dictation for clinical charting. Martin’s wife maintains a zero-chart backlog at the end of every day. “My wife has a zero chart backlog at the end of every single day,” Martin said. “Usually that chart for that client is done before that client leaves the building.” Before Digitail, she was getting home at 8 or 9 p.m., trying to recall what she had said during an appointment she saw at 10 in the morning. The difference is not just time. It is the energy to show up the next day.

The time gains extend across the whole team. Vet assistants record room interactions on their laptops and the AI processes the notes automatically. Receptionists record client calls, which log directly to the client communication record. No more typing, no more detail lost. Martin himself used Digitail’s built-in AI tools to create a marketing advertisement for a new buy-now-pay-later payment option. A task he had budgeted a half-day to complete took 20 minutes. “Now I have four hours of my day back to do other stuff,” he said. Hefner Road has built 70 to 80 SOPs the same way: feed the information in, edit lightly, print, laminate, done.

That reclaimed time is what makes training possible. It is what makes rhythm possible. It is, Martin argues, what makes seeing 1.5 times more patients per day possible without burning out.

The business side is the medicine side

One of the most direct moments of the conversation comes when Martin addresses the discomfort many DVMs feel around words like “efficiency” and “bottom line.” His position is simple: the business and the medicine are not in tension.

“If the business is done right and operationally we have that rhythm, I can help more animals,” Martin said. “I can say yes to the person who doesn’t have that much money who just needs to euthanize their pet.” A clinic that runs well can send staff to conferences, offer payment plans, discount when it matters, and see more animals in need without exhausting the team.

The natural outcome is that DVMs need to stop doing work they were never trained to do. “Why are you doing payroll? Why are you doing the taxes? Why are you doing the bookkeeping?” Martin asked. “If you just want to be a doctor and have the time to be a doctor, then outsource some of that.” He uses a vet-specific bookkeeper, a vet-specific accountant, and Digitail for payment processing, scheduling, and charting. Going paperless alone saves Hefner Road roughly $6,000 per year. These are not luxuries. They are the infrastructure that makes good medicine financially sustainable.

Three things you can do today

Martin left listeners with three concrete actions.

1. The first is to outsource what bogs you down mentally: accounting, bookkeeping, payroll. Vet-specific providers exist for all of these. The cost is a fraction of what it costs to do it slowly and badly yourself.
2. The second is to get AI dictation for your clinical charting. “You’re going to get your sanity back,” Martin said. “I promise you’re going to get your sanity back.” A zero-chart backlog is not a fantasy. It is a technology decision.
3. The third is to trust your staff. Train them, give them real responsibility, and then get out of their way. “Your staff wants to learn. Your staff wants to be better. Help them be better. If they’re better, you’re better. The clinic is better. The patients are better.”

Frequently asked questions

What is the most common cause of operational chaos in vet clinics?

Funneling. When staff migrate toward every problem, whatever they were responsible for goes unattended. The fix is clear role assignments and written SOPs that define exactly who responds to what, including emergencies, so the rest of the team can stay in position.

How did Hefner Road go from 10 to 19 patients per day?

Through a combination of defined roles, cross-trained staff, AI-powered charting, and AI-generated SOPs that eliminated the small time losses scattered through every appointment. Five minutes here, 8 minutes there, 12 minutes somewhere else. Add them up and you have two extra hours in the day.

Is cross-training realistic for small practices?

Yes. Staff do not need to master every skill. A receptionist who can draw blood and hold for procedures becomes a meaningful resource during sick days and high-volume periods. Partial cross-training is far more valuable than none, and it gives ambitious team members a concrete path to grow.

Does AI take jobs in veterinary clinics?

At Hefner Road, the opposite happened. Martin hired more staff because AI-powered efficiency created the capacity to see more patients. “AI can’t restrain. AI can’t draw blood,” he said. More patient volume means more people on the floor, not fewer.

What does a cloud-based practice management system do for operations?

It lets owners and managers monitor the clinic from anywhere. When Martin travels to a conference, he can check the flow board, schedule, and payment screen from his phone. That visibility means he does not need to be physically present to know whether the clinic is running on rhythm, and it is what makes it possible for practice owners to actually attend CE without spending the whole time in the hallway on the phone.

Listen to the full episode

The full conversation covers even more ground: how Martin approaches vendor relationships as a free source of staff education, why Lunch & Learns are underused in vet med, and what it looks like to build a clinic culture where people genuinely have fun at work. Martin and host Dana also get into the economics of going paperless, how to find vet-specific financial and accounting vendors, and what Martin looks for when he hires staff who will actually stay.