Financial conversations: Build confidence & trust
With the right tools, any veterinary professional can approach cost-of-care discussions with confidence, empathy, and clarity—and help guide owners to solutions that provide needed care even when financial means are limited. This session provides practical strategies to educate clients about the value of preventive care, financial preparedness, and available financing options. Explore techniques for handling tense or emergency situations with empathy and without judgment, reducing stress and supporting team wellbeing. Emphasis is placed on transforming difficult conversations about money into opportunities for transparency, trust, and stronger veterinary-client-patient relationships. By equipping veterinary team members with knowledge of financial tools and effective communication skills, this session can help minimize emotional and ethical distress, improve team culture, and help ensure patients receive the care they need. Whether you’re discussing routine preventive care or urgent medical decisions, you’ll come away with actionable strategies to guide clients, help patients, support your team, and create a more positive, collaborative approach to the cost of care.
This session originally was presented at AVMA Convention 2026.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
- Recognize the role that client finances play in patient care and how limited finances can contribute to emotional and ethical distress for veterinary teams.
- Develop communication skills to discuss the cost of care with clients and forge a partnership to improve patient outcomes, especially when finances are limited.
- Identify strategies for training and supporting the whole team in handling challenging financial conversations with confidence and empathy.
| Kate Boatright, VMD, has worked in small animal practice since graduating from Penn Vet in 2013. She remains part-time in the clinic as a general practitioner and emergency clinician, prioritizing the individual needs of clients and their pets. As an advocate of spectrum-of-care practice she provides training through lectures at conferences, webinars, and individual clinics. She is a contributing author to an upcoming Spectrum of Care textbook and has written on the topic for numerous industry publications, JAVMA, and Advances in Small Animal Practice. In 2023, she self-published the Veterinary Mentorship Manual, a guidebook for practices looking to offer formal in-clinic mentorship to new veterinarians. She regularly writes and speaks about mentorship in the veterinary profession, provides mentorship consulting services for veterinary hospitals, and is a contributing author to a Mentorship textbook that will be released in summer 2026. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, running, and watching movies or playing games with her husband, son, and cat. |
| Ricky Walther, DVM, is a small animal general practitioner in the greater Sacramento, California area. Realizing the positive financial and medical impact that pet insurance can provide for pet owners and the profession, he lends support and advice to companies like Pawlicy Advisor ("The Pet Insurance Marketplace") that simplify the process of connecting with veterinary financing resources. |
