Innovation Station

We know (or think we know) where veterinary medicine is headed over the next decade. Let’s prepare for and enjoy the ride.

I have been around long enough to be wary about futurists, the people who all too often predict a future that looks pretty much like today, only more so. None of these futurists seem to be able to see around corners or alert us to unanticipated dangers. Too bad the futurists of 1750 didn’t understand […]

Robot team members? Expanded use of artificial intelligence in veterinary education and diagnostics? Get ready.

Imagine a pet owner enters a veterinarian’s office and is greeted by a 5-foot-tall robot that provides limited but flawless reception services. Given audible instructions, the client and his pet enter a designated exam room. There, a human veterinary nurse performs hands-on procedures like a dental exam and blood draw. She then activates another robot […]

Communicating with clients and seeing patients remotely has never been easier.

It was 2015 and a woman driving a Toyota Corolla pulled into the parking lot of Monticello Animal Hospital in Shawnee, Kansas. Practice owner Crista Wallis, DVM, watched as the woman got out of the driver’s seat, pulled three wooden planks out of the trunk, opened the rear passenger door, erected a ramp to the […]

Demand for virtual care is soaring. The ever-expanding field of teleconsulting and telemedicine has options galore for any size practice. You just need to investigate and choose a partner.

Is your veterinary practice one of the estimated 32% that use some form of virtual care? If you joined the crowd due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you’re not alone — telehealth platform use skyrocketed once social distancing arrived and clinics scrambled to take care of pets while keeping their owners six feet away. But maybe, […]

Forced to pivot because of COVID-19, the profession learned more lessons about telemedicine. The pandemic exposed clinics and clients to pet-only visits and could lead to the rebranding of relief work.

It’s anything but business as usual in the veterinary profession. Over the past couple of months and likely for the next several months, practices have adapted to a world that looks very different. While each day brought surprises and challenges, there is a sense that practices have implemented protocols, adjusted hours and staffing, and begun […]

Harnessing a select group of clients can help you meet the needs of the next generation and not alienate long-time pet owners.

I received two emails less than 24 hours apart from two very different veterinary clients. One raved about how excited she was about the new program her veterinarian had implemented that would give her 5% off the invoice at each visit. She had gotten a new puppy, the costs were adding up and the discount […]

Now is the time for CE providers and users to demand more from learning experiences and work together to raise the standards.

Creative Disruption columnist Dr. Bob Lester wrote in the last issue about the state of most in-person continuing education. (Read “Always Be Learning” at http://bit.ly/2ZMT7qt.) A lot of CE, he stated, is delivered in dark rooms and 50-minute chunks by a sage on the stage, a format he described as “arguably, the worst adult learning modality.” […]

The move toward biomarker testing is an example of the expansion of preventive, predictive, personalized and participatory animal health care.

Thought leaders in human medicine like Leroy Hood, Ray Kurzweil and Daniel Kraft have been talking about the four P’s of medicine for decades, but only recently have we seen a growing awareness of predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory forms of medicine within veterinary medicine. In particular, at the Veterinary Innovation Summit in April, Jon […]

Veterinary medicine needs more possibilist thinking. Technology holds the key.

In his brilliant book “Factfulness,” physician-statistician Hans Rosling defined “possibilist” as an alternative mindset to an optimist (who simply believes that good outcomes will happen) or a pessimist (who doesn’t spend the energy to imagine good outcomes and who, by the way, is kind of boring). A possibilist instead believes that a strong set of […]

General practitioners, specialists and even students have a role to play in the evolution of telehealth and the elimination of barriers to veterinary services.

Lots of stuff is going on in the world of virtual care as its utilization shifts from innovators to early adopters and becomes more mainstream. Recent articles have shown increased client demand for telehealth services and satisfaction with its use. This past spring, the American Veterinary Medical Association hosted the Veterinary Virtual Care Summit, which […]