Megan Sprinkle: [00:00:00] Welcome to Vet Life Reimagined. What's in store for veterinary medicine in 2025? We are continuing our series bringing experts from around the profession to look into their crystal ball for the year ahead. And similar to the last episode, these three experts bring very different positions and perspectives in the profession, but this time their trend predictions greatly span across topics.
I'm bringing you Dr. Gary Marshall, Melissa Allen, and Dr. Jules Benson. We cover everything from veterinary education and veterinary career trends to well being and healthcare models and how we adopt AI. First is Dr. Gary Marshall. Gary is widely known and loved across the profession. He has a huge heart for the profession and veterinary professionals.
He started a podcast called It Might Get Weird with Sarah Rae, a first year veterinary student this year, and they are podcasting their way through her vet school experience. You can hear Gary's episode on Vet Life Reimagined from February of [00:01:00] 2023, and he explains the story behind that phrase, It Might Get Weird.
I'll link the episode in the show notes. Gary also became the vice president of the AVMA in 2024 and has spent the good latter half of the year touring around the country to vet schools, the CDC and beyond, listening and spending time with people all across the profession. So he has a very fresh and diverse perspective of what's going on in people's minds and some unique trends coming into the new year.
So here are the 2025 Trend Predictions with Dr. Gary Marshall.
Gary Marshall: I have been learning a lot this fall.
it's been, now we're going on six months as AVMA vice president and it's, I really think it's the best job in the world, even though I don't get paid. But other than that, it's been, it's been so fantastic to be allowed into spaces that I never thought I would be and to, be [00:02:00] included in stuff that, I probably have no, no reason or no right to be included in.
And I think the main for, for Trends for 2025, I think the main thing that I want to speak on first a little bit is, that education space. Cause that, the, the vice president role is sort of the liaison between our, accredited veterinary colleges and the AVMA. And so my goal has really been to, in the schools that I've been to, and I've been to seven this fall, is to meet with any faculty that want to meet with me and ask them What can we do as the AVMA?
What are your, what are your pain points? What are your concerns? What do you see coming down the road? So a lot of the trends that I'll talk about in education are, are basically things that I've learned from speaking to educators and I think the, um, the one I'll get out of the way first is something that I would [00:03:00] consider as sort of a crisis.
and, and that's what's been messaged to me is we're going to be really hurting for, good educators in the near future. We'll have maybe 13 more schools coming online in the next five years, or by, Yeah, I guess five years is 2030. So where we'll have, they'll be online before that, but where they'll be putting out like graduates in that period of time.
So there's gonna be a lot more students that are coming through, which I think will be another education trend that we'll see, but we don't have more educators. And I think if anything, we are. the trend is that, some of the career trends of veterinarians are in practice are getting paid a lot more than they were five, 10 years ago, which is something we've been striving for and is, good.
And some of that is definitely supply and demand. [00:04:00] And if our, Practitioners are getting paid. General practitioners, ER vets are getting paid a lot more, that goes hand in hand with then the specialists get paid even more as far as these GPs are referring to. And those specialists are what makes up most of our.
university faculty. And so if university faculty see now, wait a second, I can, I can work three or four days a week you know, in a nice facility with other colleagues. and I can get paid three times the amount or twice the amount. Then let's start looking into that. So, there is a concern and a crisis that is coming from these faculty.
Not that I'm seeing. particularly in a huge trend, but that they're concerned that they're losing faculty and where are they going to get more. And so that's, I think, one of the biggest trends that I see going forward is that we're going to be struggling with how to educate all these new veterinary students that are coming into new veterinary [00:05:00] schools.
And that leads to another possible way that we can get those educators that still has some, I think, challenges for us to, figure out how we're going to accomplish. And that would be that a lot of the Places that these educators are coming from now are from, foreign schools or foreign specialists that want to come to the U.
S., which is fantastic. There can be great educators, they can fill this need, they can come to the United States, build a career here, fantastic. The issue with that is that, and it's different for every school, it's different for every state, it's different for every specialty college, is credentialing and that kind of stuff.
And if that percentage goes up significantly, we may have some issues with the ability to, credential resident, uh, get residents in, um, be able to [00:06:00] take care of residents, interns, that kind of stuff. We lose some of that ability depending on the specialty college with having somebody that can.
basically sign off on their education as a resident. And so where are we going to get more residents, more interns, all that kind of stuff. those are our concerns going forward to be there. And that is one thing that it's not specifically, AVMA, but AVMA definitely plays a role in the ECFBG process that education commission for foreign vet grads that they have to go through that to be able to be licensed in the, in the States, and then they can go through their, specialty college and get credentialed and those types of things.
And there's a big backup from that for a lot of different reasons, but they're definitely trying to. get more bandwidth for that. So I'm looking forward to that as a trend that we will be able to get a lot of these foreign trained, specialists and veterinarians, to fill the need here in the United States at a little [00:07:00] bit higher rate than before.
Do you have any thoughts on any of those or any follow up questions on that before I ramble a lot more?
Megan Sprinkle: you know, my mind goes to why can we not make academia a more viable career, more attractive career? That would be one alternative. And another one could be that, could we approach Learning a little bit differently where we bring in maybe on occasion, whether it's virtually or in person, a in practice specialist to come in and either teach a rotation or something like that, where you're actually getting very real life, learning that way.
So it sounds like there's probably a couple of different ways that it could be approached and that may be dependent on the university or, you know, the setting.
Gary Marshall: Yeah. No. Yeah. I, so these are the trends I see. The solutions are a whole different thing.
Megan Sprinkle: That's why I'm like, Oh, Megan, don't, I'm a problem solver.
I got to keep my mouth shut. [00:08:00] I
Gary Marshall: love that. And that's so important. And I think that that comes into one other trend that I see coming. And that's in kind of that advocacy political realms. And a lot of people have those same questions and I do too. And you've had great. Guests on your podcast, talk a lot about all this stuff as far as, you know, educational theory and training new veterinarians and all that kind of stuff.
And it's been fantastic to hear them. And, I think the, the trend that I want to say in that space is that these groups that to some will see that there are In veterinary medicine, they're opposing each other, which we've, you know, in the history of veterinary medicine, those that are in advocacy and those are in, in teaching and those are, in these specialty colleges have kind of all been, working together to solve all these issues.
And now we see some groups that are saying, [00:09:00] We should do it this way instead of this way. And I think that the trend that I want to see going forward is that, and that I think we will see going forward is that these groups that may appear opposing on like, how are we going to teach these new veterinarians?
How are we going to get enough faculty? in the face of, I mean, we can, we can go there if you want mid level practitioner and VPAs, we can talk a little bit about that. But, I think we're these groups are going to realize that we all, in the end, we all want the same thing. We all want, access to care.
We all want, to be able to have our, whether they're clients, whether they're producers, whether they're whoever, to be able to get Veterinary care and veterinary services at a reasonable time. And I don't know so much about the reasonable price part yet, but that's going to be a big issue with access to care going forward, but that trend I want to see for these things, like, why can't we do education differently?[00:10:00]
Cause there are things like, well, the department of education and the federal government says you have to do it this way. And so that's the way we have to say, do you have enough of this particular type? Do you have enough? in seat time. Do you have enough lab time? talking about remote learning versus distance learning and all those kinds of things.
Those are all hoops that need to be jumped through, which may not necessarily be the best way. Might be, I don't know. I'm not an expert in that to educate veterinarians going forward in the future with when we have so many other ways now, you know, AI, everything's cloud based, individualized education models that are coming online, that kind of stuff. And how do we, how do we find out which ones actually work? And how can we get those into the system? So we can educate well, not just educate, but educate well, all these veterinary students that want to be veterinarians [00:11:00] and get them through the system in a, good way.
Without having overworked, underpaid faculty at these universities because I think there's a lot of schools that are like running on like 60 percent of their desired amount of faculty level. And that's rough.
Megan Sprinkle: Yeah, for everybody.
Gary Marshall: Yeah. Yeah. So we've got to, we've got to figure that out.
And I think we're going to realize that instead of butting heads, we should, all say, well, we all want the same thing. And we're just talking about it differently, or we're defining it differently. and how do we work together to do that? Because otherwise, we're spending a lot of time and resources.
going in different directions and that could be, I feel that could be better spent both. dollars wise and time wise and energy wise, together as opposed to apart. So hopefully we'll do that. [00:12:00]
Megan Sprinkle: I think that's a good takeaway from that section is, to be involved, listen to lots of different perspectives and see what might be best, you know, for a particular school in that situation.
So
Gary Marshall: Yeah, no, and I think that's really important. That's really good. Really good, Megan, to not just put all your eggs in the basket of like the sound bites and what you hear, you know, that these people are horrible, or these people says that this is going to happen and everything's going to be horrible, dig into it, ask questions.
I know you are so good at asking questions that people, when you have them on here and that's how we learn. And that's how we realize it's like, wait a second. I thought that person was like all backwards, but no, we're kind of on the same page. And, um, I think that's where you and I are very similar.
It was where we like to just, get people together, talk about things. Like you said, you're a problem solver. And I think we can do that. I, that, that's something I really, do look forward [00:13:00] to in the near future. And I think, this may be in territory. You don't want people to go, but I think when we have a dramatic in the federal government, the U S.
Transition in administration, like we're going to be going through here in 2025. I think people are going to realize, like, we can't, we can't keep doing this anymore. We're getting more, opposed. Everything's getting to the, the fringes on each, end of the spectrum. And that, We're going to just keep doing that back and forth unless we kind of realize that we need to work with each other.
And hopefully that will be a trend over the next, few years too. I don't know how that will happen, but I hope it does.
Megan Sprinkle: You know, it can start with one person. So there you go. and you tease, you had a third category and I think it's super relevant for this podcast cause it was around careers in vet med.
[00:14:00] So what are your thoughts around that?
Gary Marshall: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think, and I'm coming at it from the baby boomer perspective because I've been now, uh, over 35 years since I graduated. So I've seen a lot, I've seen a lot of trends, ups and downs and all that. And some of the things that have been trends in the last, you know, five years or more is a lot of corporate consolidation.
Um, we've seen a lot of people deciding that They move around a lot more than they ever used to. And, uh, we've seen a lot of, uh, very, very good careers as relief veterinarians and those types of things that people are going out on their own. And I, I think that. Some of its economy related, some of it's just saturation related and those types of things.
And people, like you say, seeing things that aren't working the way they want them to and finding a way to a [00:15:00] solution around that. So I, I do think that we will have more. And I, I think we talked about this a couple of years ago that, relief vets will, I think there's new drivers now to push them into maybe going into a practice that they can call their, their home, more than before, because I, I think some of the, definitely the, clear things that we've seen are that, practice visits are not going up like they were the last few years.
They're actually leveling out or going down some. Uh, the revenues are still going up at these practices. But, the visits are going down a little bit. And so if that's the case, I think that a lot of these, practices that have been scrambling to no matter what the price fill time slots filled days with relief veterinarians, they're probably going to be saying, Maybe we can go a day with just one less veterinarian and we'll pack those other schedules and then we'll make it up later.
And so there's a possibility that some of [00:16:00] these relief veterinarians are going to say, I can't, I can't make as much. I can't fill as many days as I want to fill. So maybe I will. take up some of these clinics that have been Been begging me to come be one of their staff veterinarians and be be part of that team And that trend will kind of snowball to make it so there's less need for more relief vets So that's one trend.
I don't know if that's good or bad. It depends on what side you're on But I think that's going to be a trend. I also think there's going to be a trend towards more individual practice ownership, not corporations, but individuals either starting or purchasing small practices and growing those.
I think there's a, huge amount of practices that owned by baby boomers, like myself, that sort of missed the bubble. and I think that they're not going to be, they're not in a position, I don't think they will ever be in a position to be something a corporation [00:17:00] would, would want to do.
their bar is going to be more, you know, at least three, five more veterinarians in a practice. So if you have a small, a small practice, individuals won't be bid out by a corporation. To be able to get into that practice. So I think there will be individuals that want to be practice owners that there's going to be opportunities from people like me to buy those practices that have been around for a long time.
And I think there's going to be, In those practices, the ability to, you know, staff them and provide a great service to a community on a smaller scale. And we might go back to a lot more, you know, one and two doctor practices instead of the big five, six, seven doctor practices. So I do see that there's a trend going for careers in the future that, I think we will.
have less as a profession, less concern over the next five, 10 years with, being in desperate shape to, to fill veterinary roles. But I, [00:18:00] I don't see. I don't see that benefit going with support staff, technicians, VAs, managers, that kind of stuff. And I, I think that we need to make some big changes to those levels.
And I don't think the mid level practitioner is going to be the savior for that. But I think that that, conversation that we've been having as a profession around that will hopefully get us talking about how we, What are the viable ways across the country, not just in one state, to make Support staff roles, viable, rewarding, sustainable.
and I don't know what that is, but I certainly hope that the next time we talk, we'll see trends that we've, come to a way to figure that out.
For today I'm just speaking for Gary, not specifically for the AVMA and, but I don't think anything I said was opposed to what the AVMA says either.
Megan Sprinkle: Next is a [00:19:00] preview of a guest coming in a couple weeks, and that is Melyssa with "why" Allen, who is a double board certified lifestyle medicine coach, founder of Veterinary Well Being Buddy, and author of the book, Healthy Living Doesn't Have to Suck. She has a fascinating story, and she brings a peek into trends in human health care and the well being space, which I predict will impact us as well.
She mentions a current event, which in case you're listening to this a little far removed, she was referring to the murder of the United Healthcare CEO and the conversations around that incident. So here is Melyssa Allen with some very insightful predictions for the new year. Looking into 2025, do you see any trends or do you have like predictions of things that you think are going to get bigger or going to be coming into 2025 when it comes to health, wellbeing, vet med, but you know, anything that may be coming outside of that, maybe we can apply it.
Melyssa Allen: Yeah, [00:20:00] absolutely. And even since we last talked, a lot has happened in our world. And honestly, I think there's going to be. a huge shakeup amongst our, our healthcare industry because, um, it's been brought to light a little bit about how insurance companies, uh, may not grant the kind of quality of care that is needed and tend to deny things that could potentially be life saving treatments.
And I, I feel like we're kind of at this weird, like, pivot moment in history where we're, we could potentially see a more, what am I trying to say? A stronger shift from the fee for service model, um, which is how things tend to be billed right now to more of like the value based care, which is where providers are compensated based on like their patient outcomes.
So like the healthier that the patients get, [00:21:00] then they receive more reimbursement. And that's something that I love about the American College of Lifestyle Medicine that provides the board certification. So really focused on health restoration and being able to teach not only clinicians about how to better coach their patients on health behavior change and thinking about how we can prescribe things other than pharmaceuticals, like can you write an exercise prescription to your patient?
Can you prescribe a whole food plant based lifestyle for someone facing type 2 diabetes? So those are all things that ACLM is very passionate about. without being anti medication, right? Because obviously pharmaceuticals have their place and time in treatment. So, so my hope, and I think with some recent events that have happened, there could be a greater light shed on can we actually shift Our current health care system from something that operates more on a [00:22:00] disease management level where we're looking at treating a lot of the symptoms of these chronic diseases that are so prevalent.
I mean, currently, six and 10. U. S. Ameri or U. S. adults are living with at least one lifestyle related chronic disease. So it's a huge issue, and I think if we can start to focus on ways to stop treating all the symptoms of these diseases to actually getting to the root cause and focusing on treating that instead, that could be a huge paradigm shift that helps to not only promote physical well being, but also mental health, because it's so intricately tied with our physical health condition, and that's why there's so many comorbidities between physical health and mental health concerns.
So um, I'm hopeful that we'll start to see a rise in lifestyle prescriptions and start to see [00:23:00] more cooperative care between. the, um, the like pharmaceutical companies and how they deliver their medications to providers and providers being able to also consider using those lifestyle prescriptions in complement with the traditional medications that are prescribed.
Um, so it's, it's going to be a very interesting year, I think, to see some of the trends in health care and what, um, insurance models start to rise up because I've worked with a couple of physicians that just completely pieced out of corporate environments and they started concierge, um, membership based primary care models and they're thriving.
Megan Sprinkle: That's really fascinating because I think we really need to stay in the know in human health care, not only for our personal health care, but also, you know, is that something that we can either learn from or because, you know, our clients coming in, they [00:24:00] also have exposure to the human health care world?
Are they going to start to expect something similar in for their pets? So I think it's really Really important to watch that very closely as, as a profession too, because that really could impact how we do things too. And in fact, maybe there's something that we do well, , you know, one health.
And finally today is Dr. Jules Benson. I was told by Aaron Massacre that I needed to include Dr. Benson in this series as he has seen a lot of stuff in the industry and would be very interesting and would have very interesting insights for you. I would love to get Dr. Benson to do a full episode soon.
He started as a veterinarian in a busy progressive ate Dr. Small Animal Practice. He has several different experiences in pet insurance. I have known him mostly for his five years with Nationwide, which Dr. Benson had a change in 2024. In October, he started his own consulting company. In addition to veterinarian and consultant, he [00:25:00] is a strategist, a marketer, and an innovator.
When he agreed to share three trends for 2025, he said he would also give three things he thinks should be trending. So he does offer quite a bit of personal perspective in these trends. AI is one big part of the trends, and he offers some additional insight from last week's episode. So, I thought it was a great excuse to try out a little AI.
So I have used a basic AI voice to do text to speech. I'm using the free version of 11labs, so think this is a very basic tool, and it gets even better. I also can bring in that lovely British accent for you, so you're not missing out on that. So for the first three predictions, you'll hear the AI voice, and then I'll share Dr.
Benson's three should trends. So here we go.
Eleven Labs AI (Speaking for Dr. Jules Benson): Three trends I think we'll see in 2025. Efficiency. We're already hearing that this is a [00:26:00] concern that's prominent among independent practices, and with the relative down year, economically, that has more significantly impacted corporate practices. Data shared by Vetsource indicates that the decrease in visitation has impacted corporate practices more.
It'll certainly be an ongoing and rising concern for them too. To me, this will be a reason to implement AI slash tech solutions, or to improve team utilisation. In and of itself, that's not necessarily a concern, but when efficiency is the primary metric for implementation, that can mean that metrics that will drive practice culture and well being can play second fiddle.
AI. We'll continue to see AI startups and AI project rollouts from mature companies, e. g. clinical decision support. The Veterinary Innovation Council will be rolling out some information in early 2025 that will provide some more context around risk reward and But my larger concerns here revolve around the sometimes unrealistic hype that can surround AI [00:27:00] enabled software.
My experience has been that people and organizations can be snake charmed by the AI hype without working out whether it's the right tool for the job. Correspondingly, we're seeing a lot of marketing hype selling AI solutions that may or may not be appropriate. My desire for 2025 is that we increase our literacy as an industry and continue to focus on the work that needs to happen, then work out whether AI is the right tool to enable that.
Corporate versus independent, related to some of the focus areas I will discuss in a minute, I think we'll see some more heat in the independent versus corporate practice space. Personally, I think there's enormous opportunity to win for both and some really compelling value propositions on each side, but I think we're starting to see some vitriol.
Personally, I see opportunity for corporate practices to invest heavily in some of the focus areas I list below, which will create osmosis and trickle [00:28:00] down for all. And I see enormous opportunity in the agility and marketability of independent practices when it comes to addressing cost of care, for example.
Not sure they'll be winners and losers, but there might be some strident conversations.
Megan Sprinkle: I hope you enjoyed that little bit of AI flavor to talk a little bit about the AI trends from Dr. Benson. Now these are the three focus areas. that Dr. Benson believes that we should see more attention in 2025. First of all, is the cost of care, veterinary value proposition.
If we look at the macro trends from folks like FetSource, whose reporting revenue is up year on year by 4 percent and visits down by 2%, this is a really worrisome long term trend. If nothing else changes with these numbers, that would mean the average per family is paying almost 50 percent more per pet in 2029.
The logical conclusion for me is that A, the value proposition has to be [00:29:00] reinforced so that people who can pay feel like they're seeing value and B, we have to widen the availability of a spectrum of care so that pet families can choose care options that fit their needs and financial capabilities.
This also means increasing our evidence. based capabilities and improving client centered care, which I'll elaborate on in a minute. Kind of aside, but related, organizations like Open Door Veterinary Collective and PetSmart Charities are already making great strides in identifying incremental changes practices can make around things like payment options that increase access to care within general practices.
Number two, building a better medical data capability. As I previously said, if we want to increase or adapt our value proposition, we have to be able to show how value is being translated into outcomes. I strongly believe we'll be challenged to adopt better evidence [00:30:00] based care and invest in concepts like Based care.
To do this, we have to improve our ability to measure health outcomes, concepts like interoperability and or the use of AI in approving both our collection of medical data like scribing and our ability to interpret and classify those data are going to be key. So also is our willingness to discuss these topics in context of being critical to our evolution as a profession.
And finally, number three, client centered care. Separate from, but rolling in themes from the points previously, putting the client at the center of our work is going to be key in the next stage of veterinary medicine. This includes everything from using technology to ensure the health journey is available and inclusive to creating more transparent profile models from using data to provide individualized preventative care journeys to [00:31:00] generate New metrics like client reported outcome measures.
We're already seeing the advent of entrepreneurial models that see this as a must have like modern and pet folk and think we'll see more playing catch up. This trend also includes stratification of care. Are there nascent or new models of care that will fill the consumer need better than what we have?
One of the more interesting ones for me is practices that are dedicated to providing intermediate surgical care options, like lateral, suture for CCL. That bridged the gap formed between the primary care veterinarians and specialty practices. Also, I hope to see more investment in the work of teams like those at Guelph under Jason Coe, who are doing phenomenal work in relationship centered communication.
That concludes part two of our 2025 trend series from the challenges and [00:32:00] opportunities in veterinary education to shifts and healthcare delivery models to the growing importance of client centered care and evidence based practice. Our profession is evolving rapidly. The key takeaway. While change brings challenges, it also opens doors to improve how we educate, practice, and deliver care.
Which one do you feel most strongly about? How can you be part of it? Let me know your thoughts. Just click the send us a text in the show notes below or write in the comments if you're on YouTube. If you are enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to VetLife Reimagined wherever you get your podcasts.
Your ratings and reviews help other veterinary professionals discover these important conversations. Stay tuned for more thought provoking discussions on the future of veterinary medicine in our final episode addressing experts predictions for 2025 all next week.
