Service affordability, staff shortages, and higher cost pressures will continue to drive change in veterinary hospitals over the next three years, while the meteoric rise and wide adoption of artificial intelligence will impact even the smallest clinics.
Nationwide, veterinary hospitals are feeling the impact of price hikes, high inflation, and lower worker productivity. It’s likely to persist or worsen over the next five years, driving change to the way we serve clients and how we attempt to keep costs manageable.
Five Market Pressures Driving Change in Veterinary Hospitals
Staff Shortages and Finding Qualified Candidates
According to a 2024 Brakke Consulting analysis, the number of students graduating from accredited U.S. veterinary colleges will be sufficient to meet industry demand through 2035.
No disrespect to Brakke, but having seen a similar forecast in the 2005 AVMA Veterinary Workforce Study—only for the industry to experience two decades of overwhelming shortages—I remain skeptical. Maybe we’ll have enough vets by 2035, but right now? That doesn’t align with what I see in real-life interactions with hospitals.
There are additional factors to consider. Demand for veterinary services has risen due to a growing pet population and increased awareness of animal health. More female vets are parents and, despite many changes to how we view parenthood, women still shoulder more of the child rearing responsibilities than their male counterparts, especially when children are ill. Additionally, workers today don’t want to spend so much time working, but ‘living’. Why previous generations were content with the amount of time they spent outside of work, while today’s workers are not, is complicated. I suspect part of it is Fear Of Missing Out or FOMO. In pursuit of happiness, workers are chasing the idyllic, unreal personal lives that they view online, while dismissing the value of more grounded opportunities for happiness that are already at hand, including work as veterinarians. But, I digress. My personal theories aside, the reality is that veterinary practices remain short-staffed, and I expect that to continue over the next three years.
As a result, owners will look for ways to maximize the efficiency of their existing veterinarians, rely more heavily on technologies like telehealth and artificial intelligence to handle clerical responsibilities, and encourage teams to lean more into the fulfilling, satisfying aspects of direct, client facing responsibilities.
Decreased Consumer Confidence and Signs that Price Increases Have Eroded Client Trust
Several factors are making consumers more cautious about spending: ongoing, albeit mild, inflation; the threat of a trade war; visibly higher prices for essentials like fuel and food; geopolitical unrest; recent stock market volatility; and persistently high interest rates. However, veterinary medical services have traditionally been resilient to economic downturns, reinforcing the long-standing belief that our industry is inelastic—meaning higher prices don’t significantly reduce demand.
That assumption may no longer hold. More hospital owners are reporting client pushback on pricing, and some data supports this shift. In 2024, veterinary revenue across North America grew by nearly 8%, yet the number of invoices increased by only a meager 1%. This suggests that growth has been built on price increases, not demand, and that rising prices may be dampening clients’ interest in purchasing our services.
With consumer confidence waning, veterinary owners will likely look for ways to cut costs to offset the slowdown in sales revenue.
Technology Integration and Costs
In my 25-year career, I’ve witnessed dramatic changes in our industry: the shift from paper to digital charts, the rise of payment options for clients, the introduction of pet insurance, and, of course, the internet. But over the past decade, the pace of change has accelerated even further. We now have internal communication platforms, client outreach tools, multiple social media channels for engaging with pet owners, transcription services, telemedicine platforms, and artificial intelligence—all of which we’ve had to learn, adapt to, and integrate.
Rapid advancements in technology deliver a twofold challenge. First, they require our teams to continuously learn and adapt in order to effectively serve clients. Second, they propel us into uncharted territory. While we may grasp the immediate value of AI and successfully implement it in our practices, the long-term implications remain uncertain—how it will influence consumer spending, reshape business models, or redefine competition? Consider how Uber, Home Depot, Subway, and Walmart Supercenters rendered taxis, local hardware stores, mom-and-pop diners, and independent grocers nearly obsolete in record time.
Thus, practice owners are left between a rock and hard place. They can’t turn a blind eye to the march of progress, yet remaining in step with these many changes becomes more and more difficult every year.
Worker disengagement and dissatisfaction
Increased worker disengagement and dissatisfaction are widespread across many industries. This isn’t just a “young people” issue—workers of all ages are less focused, less engaged, and more dissatisfied than their predecessors. There are many contributing factors, but the key takeaway is that the pressures causing this disengagement aren’t going away anytime soon. If anything, they’re likely to intensify.
Over the next three years, veterinary leaders will face several critical challenges: how to increase worker productivity while navigating a very real decline in business and profits; how to manage growing resentment as employees, despite having receiving higher wages, better benefits, and more flexible schedules, remain less productive than they were before the pandemic; and how to avoid falling victim to the same external and internal pressures that are disengaging the rest of the hospital staff.
Any additional strain on veterinary businesses will make hiring, supporting, and retaining engaged employees an even higher priority than it already is.
Competition
As pet owner visits decline, the urgency to acquire new clients and retain existing ones will only grow. With a vast array of technological tools available to support this effort, hospital owners won’t just be focused on attracting and keeping clients—they’ll also need to analyze competitors’ strategies; learn about the new technologies on the market that may be of help; onboard and integrate these new products; and train staff on how to use them effectively.
For small private hospitals, this burden will likely fall on an already overextended owner who is balancing management responsibilities with his role as veterinarian-producer. Larger hospital groups, on the other hand, will face the complexity of widespread adoption and the risk of uneven implementation across locations, particularly in hospitals lacking strong local leadership or buy-in.
The competitive landscape of 2026 will be more intense. It will demand marketing and strategic skills that many veterinary professionals have neither studied nor had the opportunity to develop.
Five Solutions To Market Forces
After considering these challenges, it’s clear to me that practice leaders will seek solutions in five key areas.
Transition from Clerical to Client-Facing
Technology has reached a critical tipping point—it can now handle the clerical aspects of client service more efficiently, accurately, and consistently than humans. Automating these tasks addresses chronic staff shortages, improves accuracy, reduces missed sales opportunities, and delivers the instant solutions clients now expect.
Financing Solutions
More companies are entering the market with consumer financing, payment plans, rewards programs, and wellness package management. These modern solutions offer faster client screening, easier application processes, and streamlined collections for veterinary offices. As economic pressures continue to strain consumer savings, veterinarians who provide flexible payment options will help reduce clients’ financial stress while maintaining revenue flow.
Managing Technology
With an overwhelming number of tech solutions to evaluate and implement, more veterinarians will turn to industry-specific tech support companies. These experts can help practices navigate options, optimize efficiency, minimize redundancy, and ensure seamless integration of third-party applications with the practice management software. When adopting new technology, the details matter—having experienced guidance will prevent costly implementation missteps.
Innovation
There is only so long that veterinary hospitals can pursue a workflow system that requires high staff-to-client ratios when they don’t have any doctors and they don’t have any staff. Leaders must rethink how their practices operate, acknowledging that staffing challenges, rising costs, and increasing employee demands will never go back to past norms. That prospect has long since passed. This year will mark the emergence of hybrid models where forward-thinking veterinary teams develop innovative ways to work with, rather than in spite of, their constraints.
Cloud-Based Software
A major shift from server-based to cloud-based computing is inevitable in the coming years. Many software providers are already phasing out older, cumbersome server-based systems, leaving clients with little choice but to migrate. Additionally, the growing number of veterinary apps requires seamless data integration with patient records to reduce redundant work and improve workflow efficiency. Practices that transition early will be better positioned to adapt to the evolving digital landscape.
Discussion
Transition from Clerical to Client-Facing
Veterinary professionals are so entrenched in their current way of doing things, that I am rarely successful at conveying this message: we spend too much time on a way of serving clients that ultimately benefits no one—not the client, the patient, the hospital, or the team. Consider the following points:
Systems Left Over from the Analog Era
The process of checking in at the desk, taking a history, and checking out at the desk was designed for an era when information was written on paper and passed around. But in today’s world, where information is instantly accessible, is this long-winded journey through the building really necessary?
Extensive training required
As an employer, you spend as much—or more—time training your employees the system of healthcare, than you do teaching them how to deliver care. Take a moment and think about that. I’m suggesting that we talk more about processes than purpose. Do you think that’s true for your organization? What is the longterm impact on a team that regularly hears about healthcare in the context of forms, signatures, initials, and protocols?
Because we’ve agreed that clients and pets have to be passed from receptionist-to-tech-to-doctor-to-tech-to-receptionist, we have established innumerable protocols all of which have to be trained to our new team members, when we have neither the manpower or the time to do the training.
It doesn’t work for you at your doctor’s office
Your human doctor puts you through the same paces (check in, waiting in lobby, exam room, labs, and check out) that you put your clients through when they bring their pets to your office. Is it a good experience? Most would answer an emphatic no. If I were to ask you to rebuild how human doctors see human patients, you could rattle off a number of great ideas, yet to our own way of doing things we remain intractable.
It highlights our shortcomings
We’ve been short of qualified, experienced, trained, engaged team members for 5 or more years now, yet we persist on serving clients with a system that requires qualified, experienced, trained, engaged team members. Our cycle of service showcases our greatest weaknesses and regularly falls short of delivering outstanding care because we don’t have the people it requires to function optimally.
It’s expensive
For all the boasts of how our system ‘leverages the doctor’s time better’, I don’t think our existing method of serving patients generates more net revenue than the models of the mom and pop shops of yesteryear. Expenses are much higher today, our system of service is too fussy, and the lion’s share of additional revenue we generate each year is built on higher demand for pet services and higher prices, not efficiency.
Solutions
My guess is that the next 3 years will put enough pressure on veterinary teams to see beyond the limits of how they believe their services can be delivered. Here are some of the tools they will explore:
Front Office Assistants Powered by AI
If I told you that AI is advanced enough to handle most client calls, you might be skeptical. So, what I want you to do is go to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and ask it your toughest veterinary questions. You’ll be surprised at how accurately it answers them.
Today’s AI companies leverage powerful platforms like OpenAI to create customized tools for specific industries, such as veterinary hospitals. Imagine needing a land rover to navigate your industry’s unique terrain—rather than building the vehicle from scratch, you can use OpenAI’s robust engine and simply customize the frame to fit your needs. This means you get a tool tailored to your business and budget, but backed by billions of dollars in engineering and the vast information available on the internet.
One such company, PeerLogic, offers a remarkable AI tool called AIMEE. The range of tasks AIMEE can perform is astounding. Its telecommunication capabilities alone rival the knowledge of your most experienced customer service representatives:
- Never misses a call.
- Ensures no opportunity slips by, always alerting clients to lapsed services, overdue bills, or other pets in the household needing attention.
- Manages reminders.
- Transcribes and summarizes each call, then uploads the information to the patient record.
- Analyzes each call to provide leaders and front desk staff with valuable insights for improvement.
- Automates routine tasks.
- Manages booking, rescheduling, and canceling appointments.
- Handles new client calls to ensure no opportunity is missed
While AIMEE and similar AI tools won’t replace the empathy your team brings to the table, they serve as invaluable assistants to your overworked CSRs. AIMEE handles the mundane flawlessly, freeing up your human staff to focus on more meaningful tasks.
PeerLogic is here at the Fetch Conference—stop by their booth for more information.
Transcription
AI-driven transcription is improving every year. Its ability to listen to client exchanges, instantly transcribe them, summarize them, and input them into the electronic patient chart is a time-saving convenience that no veterinary practice leader, focused on maximizing doctor time, can afford to ignore.
It would be hard for your imagination to outpace the all too real things AI-driven transcription will do over the next couple of years. Some are already capable of generating a proposed assessment based on objective and subjective findings, offering a prioritized rule-out list, and suggesting a treatment plan. In the near future, AI scribes will be able to profile clients based on past interactions and suggest ways professionals should communicate with them. They’ll instantly report on other pets in the household, their risk for cross-infection, and even what recommendations should be extended to them.
AI-driven transcription has the potential to solve one of veterinary medicine’s most stubborn and arguably objectionable obstacles—writing up patient charts. With access to a vast global database, and with its continuous improvement, AI will provide new veterinarians with the confidence and confirmation they may lack in practices with limited mentorship.
Client Financing Instruments
I’ve worked in veterinary medicine for 26 years, and for all 26 of them, we’ve been talking about veterinary financing, wellness plans, and insurance. While all have been, and continue to be, successful to varying degrees, they haven’t fully lived up to the transformative promises some companies made. However, with advances in technology, more user-friendly client interfaces, and economic pressures, client financing tools are becoming more widely used and may help practices navigate potentially leaner days ahead.
Companies like CareCredit and Vetbilling continue to provide reliable financing options for pet healthcare. Newcomers like Cherry Payment Plans offer similar services with higher approval rates, lower provider costs, and the ability for pet owners to use services for dentistry, dermatology, and plastic surgery. Additionally, Cherry includes an integrated rewards system, allowing clients to earn points that can be used against invoices from either MDs or veterinarians.
Ways to Manage the Tech
Many of you have been burned before when trying to onboard new technology that promised to be easy, but ultimately proved complex to implement. With so many options to streamline workflow, veterinarians will increasingly rely on tech companies that specialize in veterinary-specific applications and software to help them understand the available technologies and how best to integrate them.
Schultz Technology is one of the industry’s leading providers in this area. With their experience, they know the ins and outs of all veterinary PIMS systems, both server and cloud-based, and the many applications that need to interface with them. They are large enough to be highly capable but small enough to offer a personal touch.
PawTech is another exceptional provider, known for its deep knowledge in cybersecurity and software troubleshooting. Their team members, who are former veterinary care professionals, have walked in our shoes, bringing both technical expertise and industry insight.
Inspiration to Change
Ours is not the only industry suffering from intransigence. Once teams hone a process, it’s hard for them to see that their work could be done any other way. Design Thinking is a process by which many companies stimulate creative ideation and change in the workplace. I have experimented with Design Thinking quite a bit and have developed a number of creative games and thought exercises for you to try out with your team. You can learn more here.
Hiring For Emotional Intelligence
As we steer away from the more clerical to the more consultative ways of delivering care, we’re going to need team members with high emotional intelligence or E.Q. People with high E.Q. are the ones you would likely describe as multi-takers or ‘getting it’. These are people that can read the room, that can stay three steps ahead of potential client issues, that you would call ‘street smart’.
Companies are increasingly discovering the impact employees with high E.Q. can have on their business health, happiness and profit. You can learn more about high E.Q. and how to screen for it here.
Cloud-Based Software
We’re on the cusp of a seismic shift from server-based to cloud-based software, and it’s hard to imagine any veterinary practice not making the transition in the next 3 to 5 years. Although there are excellent apps for checking in, telemedicine, rewards points, reminders, follow-ups, etc., we lack a streamlined way of integrating this data into our PIMS because server-based PIMS are too clunky to update and stay atop tech’s fast changes. Consequently, we’re burying our CSRs in dashboards, redundancy, and manual information copy and pastes. Cloud-based software, on the other hand, allows our hospital to grow, adapt, and integrate alongside our partners for optimal performance.
- Integration with Other Tools: Cloud-based systems often integrate easily with other services, like payment processing and appointment scheduling.
- Remote Accessibility: These systems can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, allowing for greater flexibility.
- Scalability: Cloud solutions grow with your practice, enabling you to add or remove features, storage, and users with minimal infrastructure changes.
- Automatic Updates: Cloud providers handle software updates, ensuring your system is always up-to-date.
- Cost-Effective: Cloud solutions generally have lower upfront costs, offering subscription-based pricing that is more predictable.
- Data Backup & Security: Cloud services often include robust backup and disaster recovery options, protecting data from hardware failure or local disasters.
- Collaboration: Cloud systems enhance collaboration across teams, locations, and devices.
- Reduced IT Burden: Cloud providers manage security, server maintenance, and updates, reducing the need for in-house IT staff.
- Data Security & Compliance: Cloud providers invest in security measures to meet regulatory standards like HIPAA.
- Disaster Recovery: With data stored in the cloud, it’s protected from local disasters such as fire or flooding.
When considering cloud-based software, it’s best to work with experienced companies like Schultz or PawTech to define your goals and ensure seamless integration between diagnostic tools, medical record upkeep, client communication, and charge capture. It’s also important to ensure the provider has the capability to evolve with the technology landscape, as demonstrated by Idexx’s EzyVet.
Once your needs are clear, start meeting with software providers, learning about their unique features, and testing them out risk-free.
Conclusion
Given the scale of economic, market, and technological changes on the horizon, an hour spent discussing these tech shifts is just the beginning. But don’t worry—we’ve hit the key points. Start by evaluating the challenges facing your practice: team shortages, disengagement, rising costs, decreasing productivity, declining consumer confidence, and financial instability. With these pressures in mind, ask yourself what solutions might be the best fit for your practice and growth goals.
Could a service like Peerlogic, using AI to handle clerical tasks, free up your CSRs to focus more on clients? Are transcription services, which could save hours of a veterinarian’s time each week, worth exploring? Would transitioning to Cherry Payment Plans or cloud-based computing make sense for your practice? Don’t adopt a solution just because it’s trending—choose what works for you.
Finally, rely on seasoned experts like Schultz Technology or PawTech. They can help you navigate the complexity of these new technologies, not just in terms of what they can do, but also how to integrate them effectively and affordably into your practice.