7 Jun 2020
In a three-part series, vets and tech consultants Guen Bradbury and Greg Dickens look at the way technology will impact on the areas of communication, diagnostics and surgery. This first part looks at what communication technology might be coming online in the next five years and how practices can learn to select the right tools for them…
Image © sdecoret / Adobe Stock
January 2020 seems like a lifetime ago. A different era. Who’d have thought, back in the golden days of barely eight weeks ago, that health advice would flip from “go outdoors” to “stay inside”, that toilet paper would become a tradeable commodity, or that the RCVS would support remote prescribing of veterinary medications (albeit temporarily)?
Like everyone else, veterinary practices have had to rapidly adjust. In our case, the change has led to unexpected new ways of working, new ways of prescribing and new client behaviour challenges. It’s never been more clear that external events can drive unpredictable change.
But, whatever happens in the next few months/years, some requirements will always stay the same. We will always need to connect with our clients, get information from our patients, confer with our colleagues and quiz the folks at the referral place. And, in uncertain times, we’re going to want to do that faster, better and at more of a distance than ever before.
Our normal reaction to the “faster, better, further” challenge is to tell ourselves that, if we just try a little harder, we’ll be able to muddle through by doing the same old things with the same old tools. Sometimes we can. And sometimes we really can’t. Consider the three scenarios in the panel below.
1. You’ve just hung up the phone after yet another telephone interview with a recent-ish grad. They sounded perfect for the role, and you had been hoping that they’d agree to come in for a face-to-face interview, but, just like the last two, they lost interest when you admitted that you couldn’t offer any working from home.
2. You couldn’t believe when it first happened to a colleague, but now an ex-client is aiming a similar lawsuit at you for “negligence in failure to provide a second opinion”. Once telereferral became ubiquitous, clients learned to expect consults to end with a couple of minutes’ chatting with a specialist on a screen. You doubt the case has legs, but that niggling doubt has got you kicking yourself for letting the subscription lapse.
3. First there was COVID-19, then that bad seasonal flu a couple of years later – nowadays it seems like enforced social distancing happens every few months. And when people are scared of sharing a small room with a stranger, they certainly don’t bring their animals to the vets’. It’s damaging the business and the health of the animals under your care.
In those possible future situations, and thousands of others like them, the vet cannot provide the communication that is required without a change in technology.
So, what is the bare minimum of technology that lets us meet the needs raised by those scenarios?
In the first scenario (ignoring the fact that, even today, it should have been a video interview), a range of practice roles could have provided the recruiter with an opportunity to say it did offer some working from home, and was actively trying to enable more – from the teleconsultancy for rechecks and re-prescriptions at one end, to things like doing a couple of hours of social media engagement at the other.
Demand for veterinary graduates in professional roles outside of practice has never been higher, and we need to acknowledge that being able to offer a degree of flexibility, like our competitors, will help us retain talent in mostly clinical roles.
In the second scenario, we’re well into the realm of teleconsultancy proper, but within a practice-to-practice framework (rather than vet-to-client), which makes things a little easier technically: there’s an experienced user at both ends of the software, meaning the interface doesn’t need to be completely watertight; there’s a vet with the animal at all times, so there can be a traditional in-person clinical exam; and everyone’s on the same team, dropping the risk of cyber attack and regulatory burden.
However, bear in mind these reductions in technical burden are partially offset by needing to come up with a new way to charge clients for this service.
Finally, the third scenario poses a more holistic challenge: while we can expect some provision for companion animals with surgical emergencies, in times of national emergency many animals will either be seen by remote vets or not at all. We won’t have the luxury of choosing which cases do and don’t come in the practice.
As a result, scenario three requires not just good ownership behaviour, but also a far more reliable and secure teleconsultancy system, with proven capacity for a good at-home clinical exam, diagnostics at a distance, and either remote prescribing or direct drug delivery. Luckily, regulation moves fast in times of crisis, and technology already exists that meets most of these requirements.
Clearly, the precise level of the requirements changes to match the severity of the need we’ll be faced with, but the type of requirement remains the same. And this gives us a way to pick the best technologies for your practice.
So, what are these “types” of tech requirements? How do we suggest that veterinary practices can be ready to pick a winner without even knowing what great modern technologies
the future might hold?
In all of the aforementioned scenarios (and a few others that we didn’t include), the tech needs to provide:
Bandwidth. We humans are simple creatures, and we find communication a lot more pleasant, convincing and memorable if we can clearly see and hear the person we’re talking to. Increasing that clarity increases the effectiveness of your communication. Clarity is limited by total data transfer rate (namely, bandwidth).
Ease of use. Another thing guaranteed to irritate a client is a difficult user interface. And when people get irritated, they are much less likely to follow advice or give a truthful history, even if they know that both of those are in their best interests. Communication tech should be “fun”. It’s not fun when these things don’t work:
Reliability. A crystal clear 3D image at the snap of your fingers is still no good if it only works two times out of three. If technology is to be trusted with our patients’ lives and our clients’ peace of mind, it needs to work reliably. Again, you can test this yourselves, or you can rely on industry reports or consumer organisations like Which?.
Security. One thing consumer organisations can’t really help you judge is whether new tech has sufficient security to be used with sensitive veterinary data. The RCVS has guidance on GDPR and will continue to produce guidance on data security as things evolve; but, at the end of the day, practices need to have an opinion on acceptable levels of risk.
Cost. Finally, if you find a miracle technology that is outside of what you can afford then it is not what your practice needs. Subscription business models are very common currently, which allow you to try out tech without risking too much capital. Also, if you want to use a tech for zero upfront cost, you may be able to arrange a profit share.
Our need for communication technology will very likely increase over the next five years.
Simultaneously, the number of apps, devices and platforms offered to vets will explode. When picking one for our practices, we should try to optimise bandwidth, ease of use, reliability, security and cost. Doing so will enable us to achieve the best of whatever we need to do as a profession – be that teleconsultancy, remote examinations or telereferral.
And, what if you put effort into selecting the best technologies in the future and none of our scary scenarios come to pass? Well, then you’ve just wasted your time making a better practice for you, your colleagues, your clients and your patients. Darn.
