2 Dec 2022
New technology has delivered massive change in the area of veterinary diagnostics – especially during the past two years.Seth Wallack and Eric Goldman discuss how to harness these developments to drive practice productivity in an increasingly challenging economic environment…
Image © AnnaStills / iStock
A year ago, we wrote an article in which we talked about the rapid pace of new technologies being offered to veterinarians.
Technological developments continue, but as some may have already experienced, rising inflation will bring changes such as a slowdown in investment in new technologies, delay of new equipment purchases at your practice or hospital and impact of prices on the consumer’s acceptance of treatment plans or referrals.
For years, we have been very busy as pet ownership has grown and pet owners have insurance or additional money to pay for services. We don’t foresee this changing dramatically with inflation; however, we do foresee that people will shop around, educate themselves more on the need for certain services, possibly extend the length of time between wellness exams or opt for doing more at your clinic than at a referral facility.
Depending on the extent of economic impact in your area, this can result in an increase in workload at the primary veterinary surgeon’s office or, potentially, a slowdown in visits. Should you be asked to do more in-house by your pet owners, improving practice productivity and/or controlling costs will be extremely important.
In the previous article, we talked about technology solving productivity and efficiency challenges. In this article, we’re going to focus more on the productivity side of the equation.
As Seth is a radiologist and owns a business-to-business teleradiology practice, we are fully aware of the impact of inflation. Rising rent, utilities, supplies, employee wages and very expensive specialised equipment are all simultaneously increasing. This means we needed to raise rates, as well as look for cost-saving options for our veterinary surgeon clientele.
For our clientele, we created a product called Vetology.AI that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to send back virtual radiologist reports that can interpret findings in minutes to help vets quickly make decisions about treatment plans. The model is a monthly subscription charge, so clinics do not have to pay for each case evaluated, which helps control the costs for patient care.
On a monthly basis, the subscription averages a few euros per report, which allows owners to put money into other needed services and sometimes forego the fee for a teleconsult. We have found our veterinary radiology AI technology can lower costs for some of your cost-conscious pet owners, as well as improve your workflow, enabling real-time treatment plans while the patient and pet parent are still at the clinic.
Our vet clientele have repeatedly told us that the AI result helps them feel more confident when the result agrees with their own assessment, which gives them the confidence to get treatment started sooner.
But as a “human and AI go better together” teleradiology company, we expect our veterinary surgeon clientele will still have radiographic questions. To fill that need, we offer two services – one is a lower-cost, single-question service and the other is the traditional teleconsulting option. We tell our clientele that if they struggle with understanding what they are looking at, they should send the case in for review.
Even under these cases, AI can play a role in driving down costs. For example, most places will take both thoracic and abdominal images. If AI comes back with a “normal thorax” and a small intestine obstruction that agrees with the vet’s concerns, the surgeon can focus their consulting request to that particular body region.
More than 70% of Vetology AI veterinary clientele take advantage of single region reads, which is a 33% cost saving to the practice.
We are always looking for ways to help out pets and costs will become even more important in a challenging economic situation. Every step in the diagnostic and treatment process has ways to control costs while simultaneously being able to provide the right level of diagnostic or treatment for the animal, which is what we all want.
Telemedicine will likely play an even larger role in primary veterinary surgeon workflow – particularly in the hardest hit economic areas where referral is no longer an option.
If you find your pet owners are unable to proceed with a referral, you have more choices than ever when it comes to telemedicine, real-time speciality services, and social and online platforms.
Many of these technologies previously existed; however, COVID spearheaded dramatic shifts to far greater use of outpatient platforms and services. Remember to shop around and look for peer reviews, and compare costs of these services, as you’ll be using them to provide treatment options back to your pet owners.
The following are some other technologies we’ve come across that you may want to consider as you deal with inflationary concerns. We’re sure similar services and other new products are available from providers in the UK to help boost productivity, in whatever field of practice you happen to be in – be it small animal, farm or equine.
It is certainly worth exploring the options in more detail, as they could help your productivity as you attempt to stay ahead of inflationary pressures and collaborate with others on the more complex cases in your practice.
Vehri is a new digital collaborative platform that brings together hundreds of imaging experts from all over the world in a space where they share knowledge and experience, which results in better diagnoses and treatment options for veterinarians.
The company has three offerings, all based on the digital collaboration platform. It can be used for clinical collaboration, education/mentoring and research, and as a community and decision support function for veterinary imaging experts.
The system is beneficial for those who do not have immediate colleagues to discuss their problems with and for smaller residency groups or external residents to mentor and provide them with hundreds of new colleagues who are often extremely knowledgeable in their fields.
Vetexpertise is an online platform for veterinary teleconsultation that allows for communication between the general practitioners and board-certified specialists.
Clinicians can submit a case or request a video chat with the specialist. No need to lose time researching complex cases. This opens up the practice to a network of veterinary specialists without the risk of losing the client to a referral centre.
The medical procedures and treatment and case completion are all done within the practice, and the practice retains the economic benefit. This is an efficient way for general practitioners to learn and improve, based on real clinical cases, with access to up-to-date and accurate information from top specialists.
They recently launched Wisevet – a high-quality webcam service with data warehousing, a system for scheduling appointments and a payment system (adjusted to each country). These services can be used for real-time consultation between the pet parents and veterinary surgeons, or real-time consultation between a referral veterinary centre and a first opinion veterinary centre.
Corsmed has developed an online, subscription-based, advanced MRI simulation platform (cloud-oriented engine for advanced MRI simulations; coreMRI) delivered as a web service through an on demand, scalable, cloud-based and graphics processing unit-based infrastructure.
This is a virtual MRI scanner delivered worldwide through the cloud that simulates the entire MRI process – from pulse sequence development to signal generation and image formation. Their vision is to provide a simulated MRI scanner for every student, teacher and operator, so that MRI will be used to its full potential, enabling better diagnostic studies.
