Four million hours of relief coverage, logged and tracked.
Roo, the San Francisco workforce platform that books relief DVMs and techs, just launched Analytics Center, a dashboard that turns that history into numbers a practice owner can actually use: shift fill rates, cancellation patterns, productivity per relief professional, and coverage gaps by location. The tool is live now for Roo's hospital users.
The Number You've Been Guessing At
You know what you pay per relief shift. You probably don't know your fill rate, how many of your posted shifts actually get staffed, or how often a relief vet canceled and left you scrambling. You definitely don't know which of your three locations leans hardest on relief or whether certain times of year show recurring gaps.
Analytics Center surfaces all of it. Charlotte Weir, Roo's VP of Partnerships, told Veterinary Practice News that practices have relied on relief professionals for years "to keep their hospitals running and protect their teams from burnout, but they've never really had a way to measure whether those staffing decisions were actually driving the outcomes they wanted."
The platform pulls from Roo's four-million-hour relief history to show patterns across time and locations, not just whether last Thursday's shift got filled.
What It Tracks (and What It Doesn't)
The dashboard gives you:
- Shift fill rate, how many of your posted relief shifts get staffed.
- Cancellation trends, how often relief professionals cancel.
- Utilization across locations, which sites book the most relief hours, and which underuse the resource.
- Relief productivity, output per relief shift.
- Coverage gaps, recurring holes in your schedule that relief isn't solving.
What it does NOT give you: a direct financial comparison of relief vs. permanent staff costs, or a ready-made decision on whether to convert relief lines into salaried positions. Those calculations are yours to build on top of the raw metrics, but the platform hands you the inputs.
If you run a multi-site practice and you've been managing relief staffing in spreadsheets or gut feel, subscribe to VeterinaryPracticeNow.
The Multi-Location Angle
Weir said some of Roo's largest enterprise accounts book "well over 100 relief shifts a year across their networks," but until now they've made staffing decisions "based on instinct rather than data."
The site-level benchmarking is the piece that matters for groups. If locations show different fill rates or cancellation activity, you now know where the scheduling problem lives, or where your local relief pool is thin. The platform lets you compare performance among locations and identify recurring patterns, including sites that experience lower fill rates or higher cancellation activity.
For single-practice owners, the tool still works, you get your own utilization data and a view of whether relief is covering your actual gaps or just filling random openings.
The Misread Everyone Will Make
This is not a tool that tells you whether to hire a permanent associate or keep leaning on relief. It gives you the utilization data to make that call yourself, but it doesn't run the financial model for you.
The dashboard shows you patterns in fill rates, cancellations, and relief productivity, but it won't calculate your break-even on converting a relief line into a salaried FTE. That math is still yours to build in a spreadsheet, using these numbers as inputs.
What it does give you is the thing you couldn't see before: whether your relief usage is covering the gaps you need covered, and where patterns suggest adjustments.
"The metrics that matter are the ones that tell the story behind your workforce."
What Changes Monday
If you're an owner-veterinarian running one practice, you can now see whether your relief spend is covering your actual staffing gaps or just patching random holes. If certain periods show recurring coverage problems, you know to post those shifts earlier or consider a permanent hire for those times.
If you're running a multi-site group, you get site-level benchmarking for the first time. Sites with different fill rates or cancellation patterns become visible, and you can decide whether to adjust scheduling, change how far in advance you post, or shift relief budget to locations with greater need.
If you're an associate veterinarian, expect the same productivity lens to eventually point at permanent staff. A tool that tracks relief professional output will likely expand its scope over time, the data structure supports it.
Weir told Veterinary Practice News that "data gives us the ability to be proactive instead of reactive," and the line is true but incomplete. Data gives you visibility. What you do with the patterns the dashboard shows you is still a decision a dashboard can't make for you.
The platform is available now to Roo users. More at the company's site.