The veterinary profession has a staffing crisis that everyone can see, and nobody can seem to fix. Approximately 70% of veterinary technicians have experienced burnout, according to the NAVTA 2022 Demographic Survey, a figure consistent with the 2023 Merck Animal Health Veterinary Wellbeing Study, which put the combined rate for technicians and support staff at close to 69%. About one in three veterinary professionals has seriously considered leaving the field.
Practice owners are trying everything: pay rises, flexible scheduling, wellness programs. Good people are still walking out the door.
There is a contributor to this problem that almost nobody mentions. It’s not dramatic. It’s paper.
Not one piece of paper. The paper that moves through a clinic at every stage of the patient journey: the intake form, the consent form, the anesthesia monitoring chart, the dental chart, the post-op care guide, and the vaccination record. Every patient. Every appointment. Every day.
The Time No One Is Counting
The average clinic handles around 500 documents a month. At a conservative four minutes per document — printing, completing, scanning, filing — that’s 2,000 minutes of staff time every month, and more than 400 hours every year. That’s more than 50 full working days.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median veterinary technician wage at just under $46,000 a year. At that rate, 400 hours of staff time spent on paperwork represents nearly $9,000 in annual labor costs. Not spent on patient care or client relationships, but on paperwork that happens before, during, and after every appointment.
Noam Landor, Practice Manager at Alison Animal Hospital in New York, described what this looks like on the floor: “Before the transition, our processes were inefficient. The front desk was bogged down printing and obtaining signatures for estimates, while technicians were delayed printing vaccine reaction documents, discharge paperwork, and informational materials.”
That picture will be familiar to anyone who has worked in or managed an independent practice.
The Record Integrity Problem
The time cost is high. But there is a second cost that carries greater risk, and it lives in the quality of the records themselves.
Paper records are only as reliable as the handwriting of the person filling them out under pressure. A consent form can be misfiled or never make it into the patient record. Discharge instructions handed to a distracted owner may never be read, and there is no record of whether they were. A missing anesthesia record is not just an administrative gap. It’s a liability.
Digital documentation addresses these risks directly. Morgan, a registered veterinary technician at Monroe Family Pet Hospital, described the practical difference: “No more misplaced consent forms. The easy-to-use anesthesia logs have made charting a breeze.”
When documents are completed digitally, they are immediately written to the patient record — legible, time-stamped, and permanently attached to the patient history. When discharge instructions are sent to a client’s phone, there’s a record of exactly what they received and when. As Landor noted, “Tracking these documents ensures they are processed by the client without the added stress of reviewing them at discharge or after a long visit.”
The Opportunity
Practices that have digitized their entire clinical workflow describe changes that go beyond efficiency:
- “Our entire flow is smoother and faster now, which allows us to focus more on customer service and patient care,” Landor said.
- “Everything is in one place and easy to access, with all information going directly to the patient’s medical chart,” Morgan said.
Four hundred hours a year is 10 working weeks — the records scanned late, the charts that were hard to read, the discharge instructions that ended up at the bottom of someone’s bag. A well-designed digital workflow gives that time back to practitioners. It also gives them the confidence that every record is accurate and exactly where it needs to be.
That seems worth talking about.