What role should AI play at your vet’s office?
Covetrus exec Scott Gillespie makes the case that it could be summarizing your pet’s medical record, saving the veterinarian time by listening to appointments and taking notes, and getting prescriptions ready to order. More than 17,000 veterinary practices use the company’s software, and annual revenues are $4.7 billion. Covetrus was formed in 2019, through the merger of Henry Schein Animal Health and Vets First Choice.
One of Covetrus’ latest offerings, VetSuite, is designed to help independent and corporate veterinary practices improve workflows and manage online sales. We spoke with Chief Product and Technology Officer Scot Gillespie about how his team is integrating AI to help improve office productivity, support better clinical outcomes, and operate more profitably.
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How has Covetrus evolved its services along with AI technology?
From a company perspective, we’ve gone back to our roots and our mission to really help practices, through our solutions, focus more on caring for pets and pet parents. While it seems maybe lofty or kind of ambiguous, we have [a solution] basically for every part of the journey that the vet, vet tech, or pet parent is going through from appointment booking through checkout and receiving a summary.
Last year we pivoted to building the Covetrus Platform… At its core, the more that you engage with Covetrus, the bigger the rebate we’ll give you. Basically, we want to aggregate demand from our practices with our suppliers and pass that savings to the practices, in the form of a rebate. To do that, we’ve got to make sure we’re fulfilling a promise of that offer, and we’re doing that through technology. Best-of-suite is how we think about the platform, and then [we offer] best-of-breed point solutions.
How does AI help tailor Covetrus’s services to its clients?
The way to think about it maybe is less around customization and more around how much the practice wants to engage or adopt it. The reason I say that is because the way that we’ve built the capabilities — because especially around emerging technology like AI in the practice, there’s apprehension, so we want to make it very approachable for the practices. For example, everything we do is adjacent to the workflow, adjacent to the [pet’s] medical record. Whether it’s human health or animal health, the medical record is the source of truth. What we’re doing is trying to optimize the workflow in the practice through AI.
I’ll give you an example. Before every appointment, the first thing a vet tech or a veterinarian does is review the medical record, especially if it’s a pet they’re seeing for the first time. Through AI, we automatically summarize the medical record ahead of that appointment, so when the veterinarian or a vet tech goes in there, it pulls out the most critical and important information — whether it’s a patient that’s been there for a month or for fifteen years. That’s one piece to help reduce the cognitive overhead that a vet tech or veterinarian will have.
Whether it’s human health or animal health, the medical record is the source of truth. What we’re doing is trying to optimize the workflow in the practice through AI.
The second piece is ambient listening. Whether it’s through your mobile device…or the desktop they have typically in the exam rooms, it can listen, with the consent of the of the pet parent, to the appointment. It will automatically summarize the appointment in SOAP notes, which is the standard for veterinary medical record-keeping. The vet then can review, modify, approve right in our product. They don’t have to use that feature, but they can use it. There really isn’t anything to customize there. It’s really just to help them reduce the overhead of typing up medical notes. We’re seeing it save around six hours per DVM [Doctor of Veterinary Medicine] per week.
Do you develop features and make changes based on user feedback? Do any practices beta test things before they go live?
All of the above. First and foremost, it’s customer feedback. What are we seeing in our practices that we want to improve in our products or improve in our offering? What’s happening in the industry, outside of the practice?
Our strategy is to help practices, and we make sure that our products and platform and features are aligned to that strategy. All of these are connected in a rubric that helps us prioritize our features. But it’s all centered around everything that we build. Everything we do is to influence a specific driver in the practice. For example, every feature is either mapped to a revenue driver to help the practice drive revenue or a cost savings OpEx improvement. Every single feature.
Covetrus frequently releases new features, so what kinds of things are you working on now?
The majority of the capabilities we’re building now are either pure AI or AI-influenced, meaning there’s AI working behind the scenes.
The next iteration that we’re launching, in early Q2, is workflow automation. If you think about it, we have this platform that we’ve built that’s bringing our products — our online pharmacy, our B2B ordering, our PIMS [Practice Information Management System], our client communications, making appointments, booking appointments, modifying appointments — together into a platform. Because of that, we can trigger workflows automatically.
We use ambient listening to listen to the appointment; the vet says, “I’m going to give you a prescription for gabapentin,” and we automatically create that prescription in our vRxPro — our online pharmacy product — so the veterinarian doesn’t have to do it manually.
The next phase, also coming in Q2, is leveraging AI for clinical insights. We have the largest animal health data set in the country, and that gives us a huge opportunity to provide relevant insights to vet techs and veterinarians while they’re caring for their patients.
A vet has the information in their head that they’ve learned through school, through conferences, through the experience of seeing pets every day. They have knowledge from their staff, and references outside. But we can bring the power of the largest dataset in the country as a tool for them to validate what they’re thinking, maybe [research] obscure cases — have you seen this before? what types of treatments worked well? — and basically unlock all that information and put it adjacent to the experience that they have. We’re trying to make it as easy as possible to gain additional insight at point of care.
The clinical insights, I think, will really change the dynamics and care for pets in the practice. It’s almost like bringing ChatGPT to life, but on the largest anonymized animal health dataset.
What direction do you hope AI will take Covetrus in the future?
The clinical insights, I think, will really change the dynamics and care for pets in the practice. It’s almost like bringing ChatGPT to life, but on the largest anonymized animal health dataset.
Over time, everything that AI is enabling, whether it’s in human health or in animal health, I one hundred percent believe will lead to better outcomes for patients and the pet parents. That is a mission that we’re excited to be part of. We are doing everything we can to leverage AI in a meaningful way to help influence that.
What other ways can VetSuite features help offset its costs?
[There are] point solutions that exist throughout that journey. So, let’s say that you’re a vet practice and you’re not using our platform. You’ll have a provider for your PIMS, which is your main operating system in the practice. Then you’ll have a point solution for communication: booking, online booking, sending texts to your pet patients. Then you’ll have a point solution for online pharmacy if you’re doing that. Then you’ll have a point solution for payments. Then you’ll have a point solution for your consumer, your pet parent portal.
That means that you’re paying a cost to different providers for all of those. We can save a practice anywhere from $500 to $1,500 a month if they use our platform. And we have the integrated consumer portal that you can book appointments and download medical records, which reduces work for the front desk staff.
Why include an online storefront feature for selling veterinary supplies and prescriptions online?
We encourage all of our customers and practices to get aggressive around online [sales], because the consumer is either buying with a big box retailer or they’re going to buy with you. Without an online storefront, it’s very difficult to get that business unless you’re giving each customer a prescription when they’re walking out the door.
We really make it as easy as possible to onboard. We market on their behalf so they can compete with the big box stores. We make it really easy to create proactive scripts, renew scripts. We want them to keep that business.
The way you stay independent is to be a profitable business, so the more that practice adopts tools like ours, the higher the probability that they’re going to stay independent. The flexibility that we offer is really important for them to be able to run the business the way that they want to.
How can other industries benefit by adapting similar kinds of AI tech and tools to their products or services?
You can’t read any article, listen to anything on the news, or browse the web without AI being front and center. I believe what we’re doing is asking: how can we help our customers run better businesses? And what can we do by leveraging AI to make that possible in a faster, more efficient way?
If you think about it in that context, you can deliver a much better customer experience. You reduce the time to market of capabilities.
You reduce, in our case, the overhead of the practices, which is a real issue with the amount of labor they need that’s not spent caring for pets. Tying all this to outcomes that are going to benefit your customers is the best way to orient the capabilities, but AI is going to continue to be prevalent in everything that we do in our personal and professional lives.
