The Business of Vet Med...

Visiting Novartis was almost like being treated like royalty, but more realistically like a proffesional. It was the first visit that gave us an overview appropriate for our level of training and actually gave us knowledge that we could apply to our practice. For the first time, I feel like I actually appreciate what it takes to make a pharmaceutical, from start to finish, and the time and effort that is taken into listening to what the customer wants and what the animal needs. I also found it exciting to see how benificial a training in business and veterinary medicine could be. Many of the questions I asked dealt with marketing issues and were not scientific at all and in fact I think this is a major problem in veterinary medicine. If veterinarians do not understand business then they also cannot understand the companies who make their practices run. They cannot understand how an increase in Ethanol use, means there is a shortage in corn, which means there is an increase in the demand for corn and the price goes up. This impacts the ranchers and producers who feed the corn, and also companies like Hill's who use corn as a product in their pet food. It's small examples like that driving the industries involving Vet Med, and inadvertantly, they affect the practice of veterinary medicine. Knowing more about why the profit margin on the pet food sold in the clinic is decreasing, or why the pork production facility no longer wants the same treatment plan but instead wants a cheaper option, is important to the success of a practice.