When many people hear the term digital care, they often think it refers only to telemedicine or telehealth. However, a true digital care facility, alongside a brick-and-mortar hospital, offers much more than just virtual care. The biggest distinction is that digital care fully encompasses all technology-driven solutions, including veterinary workflows, client communications, patient monitoring, and digital data collection. Access to video consults, chat-based support, asynchronous telehealth, automatic triage follow-ups, and electronic prescription refills are essential for delivering care. These services undeniably expand access to care for pet owners across the country, including those in remote areas and those facing mobility challenges. Yet, a genuine digital care environment requires significantly more from us as caregivers.
Beyond Convenience: The Role of Digital Care in Strengthening the Veterinarian-Client-Pet Relationship
Cloud-based practice management systems are becoming more secure, providing convenient and necessary real-time access to patient records from anywhere. This access improves collaboration among veterinary teams and the pet owners we aim to serve, reinforcing that digital care can enhance the veterinarian-client-patient relationship.
Digital connectivity is crucial for the comprehensive and continuous care of our patients. While significant elements such as artificial intelligence-driven decision systems, diagnostics such as radiology interpretation, slide analysis, and clinical decision-making tools are important—as well as the potential for predictive analytics to identify early diseases—there are also aspects that deserve more attention. For instance, being able to give credible updates on pet care digitally helps pet owners avoid unnecessary worry because they are brought along in the pet-care journey in real time.
Even if you are not utilizing telemedicine or virtual care, you can still gain valuable insights about your patients by having them wear smart collars or health trackers. These devices provide data or even the most basic trends, such as elevated heart rates or decreases or increases in pets treated for chronic pain from home, which can help you determine whether your treatment plan and pain management regimen are effective in partnership with your veterinary team. Additionally, access to digital pharmacies for prescriptions and automated medication refills allows compliance tracking to be managed through organized systems instead of requiring someone to tediously sift through every single medical record for prescription requests.
The Challenges of Digital Integration in Veterinary Medicine
A crucial element of digital care is communication with clients. Many practices still find it challenging to incorporate text messages, emails, and app notifications about a patient’s status while in the clinic. This communication can cover simple reminders for appointments, lab results, and treatment plans, as well as digital consent forms and automated follow-ups to collect measurable information on how well a pet is doing at home, from the owner’s perspective. A digitally connected practice also facilitates seamless payments, possibly integrating subscription-based wellness plans or “buy now, pay later” options, such as CareCredit and Scratchpay.
How Digital Veterinary Medicine Supports Both Patients and Veterinary Teams
Digitizing veterinary medicine provides data-driven operational insights. The more digital data a practice can collect, the easier it is to monitor its actual performance, including appointment efficiency, client retention, and revenue trends. This enables more intelligent medication ordering and helps identify areas within your practice that could operate more efficiently. Without access to this data, pet healthcare professionals may be unable to fully tap into operational inefficiencies.
Exciting advancements are also taking place in digitally connecting referral and specialty practices with general practices, emergency rooms, and rehabilitation centers, further enhancing continuity of care, particularly in complex cases that require referrals. The benefits of a digitally connected practice include increased efficiency, reduced administrative burdens, and an improved client experience. After all, veterinary medicine is a service industry, and the people we serve and expect digital access not only to their veterinary teams but also to their own records, which gives them insights into their pet’s health.
The Future of Digital Veterinary Care: What’s Next?
The future of digital veterinary care includes broadening access to veterinary services, especially through telehealth and remote monitoring, while also gathering real patient client-reported outcome data. In clinic, we can comment on whether a blood value is trending better. At home, what may be more valuable to the owner is that their dog wants to play fetch again. Client reports have the potential to give you insights into what they value the most about the care their pet received. This information enables us as veterinary professionals to improve how we prescribe medications after surgery or analyze information to identify diseases earlier than clinical signs typically permit because we would have insights on what is important to the pet owner. All these factors contribute to improved patient outcomes, as decisions are made based on actual data.
Call to Action: Veterinary Leaders Must Drive Digital Transformation
The ongoing success of veterinary medicine in this digital age hinges on veterinary professionals working directly with pets every day, while also placing significant responsibility on leaders to stay aware of the problems that need solutions. The effective implementation of new software will depend on our understanding of the specific issues we aim to address.
In summary, digital care encompasses wraparound services that offer unprecedented access, transparency, and continuity of care for your teams, your patients, and the pet owners we serve. Those practices that continue to actively choose not to engage with their clients and patients digitally are drawing a line in the sand that appears to be a resistance to meet clients where they are, which can significantly limit the practice’s growth and your role in the future of veterinary care.