An event today tells me that the issue reported in the recent press coverage of veterinary insurers wishing to deal with specific insurance companies isn't going to go away.

As my wife was driving this morning a rock hit her car windscreen; there was a great big crack, we can see that it's not repairable, so it needs replacing. She was too busy to deal with it, so given that we're both busy but we also need both cars I just googled windscreen replacement, found the first company that looked close, booked it in for a replacement and got on with working on something else. They said they'd come to the house (in two working days) and the cost would be £160 plus vat.

Then later on I'm still occupied but my wife is less busy so she checks our car insurance policy. We can't find the specific details relating to windscreens, or at least they are ambiguous, so she phones the insurance company up and they're really helpful: answer - yes we can replace your windscreen for you without affecting your no-claims bonus and the charge will be £75. So that was a no-brainer then and there you have a very concrete example of an insurance company working on behalf of the customer. So what if there's a charge?.....we've got value out of it as a customer because it was well under half the price and as far as we can tell so far (at the time of booking the service) there's a big advantage to us, the customer.

There are a lot of elements to any service and it may cause offence to some to compare car insurance to the complexities of surgery. In this case they just need to know make, model and year of car, are they repairing or replacing and it just then comes down to time; when do you need it done? Having thought about it though you can start to see the parallels with veterinary services. By offering healthcare plans some practices already do take away some of the risks of adverse healthcare events from clients. I can think of practices that offer differential pricing arrangements for services delivered out of normal working hours, usually higher prices; or conversely slightly cheaper services on normal working days but only at specified times convenient to the practice. One of the larger corporate practices that specialises in critical care is now already experimenting with trialling 24/7 services without a price differential for services delivered 'out of normal working hours'. So looking ahead as the market segments and different pricing models are tested I can't see veterinary insurance companies not also continuing to seek value and evidence that a particular service is better than one of the alternatives.

The Royal College has just announced that only vets on it's register of specialists will be allowed to call themselves 'specialists'. But if you are an insurance company, or an actuary working on behalf of one, are you really going to be persuaded that a specialist 'badge', possibly with a higher price tag, is necessarily the service you want to commission in the absence of evidence that this badge delivers a better outcome for the patient or client?

Considering the road ahead then, whatever happens I think that the veterinary insurance companies that organise themselves to deliver value for clients, in the way that our car insurance company just delivered value for us, are going to be impossible to ignore.