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Wellness care is all about reducing risk. We vaccinate to reduce the risk for contagious diseases, we prescribe heartworm preventives to reduce the risk for parasites, and so on.

Some health risks are nearly universal, such as exposure to contagious diseases and parasites. Others are specific to a pet's species, sex, age, location (city versus rural as well as region of the country), lifestyle or breed. All of these factors must be taken into account when developing a healthcare plan for a particular patient, whether in sickness or in health.

In ill patients, our risk analysis helps to guide us toward the most likely diagnoses so that we can diagnose and treat the pet appropriately. For example, if a Boston terrier is presented for vomiting, you might consider the usual rule‐outs such as foreign body, infectious or metabolic causes, or garbage ingestion. In this scenario, you would also want to consider pyloric stenosis, a reported genetic problem in the Boston terrier breed.

Risk assessment also guides our client education efforts. You wouldn't spend much time educating clients about a disease you only see a few times a year, or one a particular patient is unlikely to ever encounter. You'd spend those valuable few minutes you have with clients at wellness visits to talk about common things. You would want to incorporate the most common topics into a broad educational plan.

A simple way to do this is to choose one or two topics to focus on per visit, so you can educate every client about them. Examples would be dental care or obesity. Once that broader, more general topic has been covered, you can choose a risk or two to go over that is specific for the individual client or pet. What is likely to harm the patient and how might we prevent or treat the problem?