A New Era for Practice Technology

Rapid advances in AI are changing what veterinary PIMS can do — connecting workflows, surfacing insights and reducing the cognitive burden on veterinary teams.

Technology in veterinary medicine is advancing at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Artificial intelligence, in particular, is rapidly expanding what practices can automate, streamline and accomplish — and practice information management systems (PIMS) are increasingly becoming the platform that connects those capabilities.

For Scot Gillespie, chief product and technology officer, North America, at Covetrus, the pace of change is striking. Big changes are happening almost in a couple months rather than a couple years. “Things are evolving so quickly,” he said.

Particularly with AI. Indeed, AI is helping turn once-impossible ideas into practical tools, while the ability to connect technologies across a broader portfolio is opening new possibilities for workflow automation. With the PIMS serving as a central platform, Gillespie sees significant opportunities to bring those technologies together to drive efficiencies and change how veterinary practices operate.

From record-keeping to a practice command center

The core functions of a PIMS may not have changed dramatically, but what happens around those functions has. According to Gillespie, today’s systems are increasingly designed to automate the administrative tasks that once required veterinary teams to move between multiple platforms and manually enter or transfer information.

Covetrus was an early adopter of AI workflows and ambient listening, embedding those capabilities into its cloud-based Pulse platform. A typical appointment can now move from conversation to medical record to treatment plan to client communication with far less manual intervention.

“Things that may have added 20 or 30 minutes to an appointment are now automatically done for them,” Gillespie said. “That wasn’t possible years ago, and it’s just going to get better.”

That evolution points toward a PIMS that is less of a database practitioners have to work in and more of a system that works behind the scenes. Gillespie envisions the PIMS becoming “more of a passive system,” with technology recognizing the next logical step in a workflow and moving information from one point to another automatically.

In the next generation of Pulse, for example, the system can summarize a patient’s medical history before an appointment, surface key medications and other relevant information, and then move the veterinarian directly into ambient listening. Rather than navigating through multiple screens, the veterinarian essentially follows the next logical action.

“The user experience completely changes,” Gillespie said. “It’s now more of a cockpit or control center” that shows appointments, key information and necessary approvals.

The goal, he said, is to reduce the cognitive and administrative burden on veterinary teams — allowing them to spend less time managing the system and more time caring for patients and clients.

Making technology easier to adopt

As PIMS become more sophisticated, the challenge isn’t necessarily teaching veterinary teams how to use more technology. It’s making that technology intuitive enough that teams don’t have to think about it. Gillespie sees the industry as a spectrum of early adopters, the middle of the pack and laggards, with the goal of moving practices toward greater adoption by reducing the friction that traditionally comes with new technology.

“The learning curve itself shouldn’t be that difficult because the user experience is so much simpler,” Gillespie said. Rather than requiring team members to learn the ins and outs of a PIMS, the system can surface the information they need — from schedules and communications to prescriptions awaiting approval.

Covetrus is also working to make new capabilities part of the natural workflow rather than features teams have to seek out. For example, Pulse can present a summary of the day’s activities when a veterinarian starts the morning, while ambient listening can be activated from anywhere in the PIMS and automatically connect the conversation to the appropriate medical record.

“We’re continuously trying to reduce that cognitive overhead and make things easier through both the user experience and training for practices,” Gillespie said. The objective is not simply greater technology adoption, but helping practices become more productive and efficient.

AI’s potential — with the veterinarian in control

Artificial intelligence may be one of the biggest forces reshaping veterinary technology, but Gillespie said its most valuable role isn’t replacing clinical judgment. Instead, AI can help veterinarians make better-informed decisions by surfacing insights from vast amounts of data that would otherwise take significant time to uncover.

“What it can do is pretty crazy,” Gillespie said. Covetrus is using AI across its own operations and products, including efforts to analyze anonymized data from roughly half of its installed base, representing 10 to 15 years of information. That data can help identify patterns and potential considerations that might not be immediately apparent to an individual veterinarian.

The distinction is important: AI can provide a suggestion, but the veterinarian remains responsible for deciding what it means in the context of an individual patient.

“The veterinarian is still the source of truth,” Gillespie said. “They’re the ones who need to make the decisions.”

For example, an AI-powered system might flag that pets with a particular combination of symptoms, breed and age commonly experience certain conditions. The goal isn’t to diagnose or prescribe, but to give the veterinarian another piece of information
to consider.

Gillespie believes that approach is just the beginning. As practices increasingly adopt AI, he expects a “hockey-stick effect” in which technology contributes to better patient care, more efficient workflows and better-run businesses. For veterinary software providers, he said, that could ultimately create an ecosystem of tools that practices want to embrace because they make the work easier.

Giving time back to veterinary teams

For veterinary practices, the value of technology ultimately comes down to a simple question: What does it give back to the team? According to Gillespie, the answer can be significant. Covetrus estimates that its technology can return nearly a full day of productivity per week to veterinarians and veterinary technicians — roughly an hour a day, and potentially more when practices adopt the full range of available workflows.

“We’re giving back almost a full day a week to the practice and to the practitioners,” Gillespie said. That recovered time can have implications beyond productivity, particularly as veterinary practices continue to face challenges with employee retention and work-life balance.

AI is also helping practices manage routine client communications. Outbound SMS can handle appointment reminders, prescription lapses and notifications that test results are ready, while inbound automation can handle tasks such as appointment scheduling and prescription refill requests.

The goal isn’t to eliminate personal interaction. It’s to reserve it for the situations where it matters most.

“What we’re trying to do is reduce the tasks that don’t have a lot of complexity around them,” Gillespie said. That frees staff to focus on clients who need the personal, one-to-one engagement that remains essential to veterinary care.

A natural flow to practice management

If the pace of technological change is any indication, predicting where cloud-based veterinary technology will be in five to 10 years is nearly impossible. Gillespie says even short-term forecasts can quickly become outdated as AI and automation accelerate.

“If you had asked me three months ago where we were going to be in the next year, I probably would have said we’d get where we are now in a month,” he said. “It’s moving that fast.”

For PIMS, that evolution could mean the technology itself becomes less visible. Rather than spending much of an appointment navigating screens and entering information, veterinary teams may interact with the system only when needed, allowing automation to handle much of the work in the background.

“If I were to say where the PIMS experience is going, it’s going to be less about the PIMS itself and more about a natural flow of engaging periodically with technology to get your job done,” Gillespie said.

That could mean fewer clicks, more voice activation, expanded ambient listening and systems that become increasingly intelligent about what needs to happen next. Covetrus’ approach, he said, is to bring those capabilities to practices responsibly while testing them and doing the necessary due diligence.

Ultimately, Gillespie sees technology as a means to a larger goal: improving veterinary practices and, in turn, patient care.

“It will become more voice-activated, incorporate more ambient listening and get smarter,” he said. “I think what you’re going to see more than anything is that the care for pets — and I think care in both veterinary and human health — is going to getexponentially better.”

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