Megan Sprinkle : [00:00:00] Welcome to Vet Life Reimagined, where we talk about the possibilities of life and career in vet med through human stories and wisdom. So what better to spend the first few weeks of the year talking about what's happening in vet med for the year with experts. I have two experts for you today, doctors Eleanor Green and Adam Little.
Neither have been on Vet Life reimagined before. Both are well known in the veterinary innovation space. I will introduce Dr. Eleanor Green first. I asked her about contributing to the series and she was so inspired. She wrote this high level piece about the trends predicting for 2025. It's amazing, and I'm trying to help her get that published, and she agreed for a little less formal piece for us to share here with you today.
So, first about Dr. Green, she is the founding dean of the Lyon College School of Veterinary Medicine. She is Professor Amerita and Dean Emeritus of Texas A& M's College of Veterinary Medicine. She's an [00:01:00] internal medicine diplomat and an ABVP diplomat. She's previously served as president of multiple national organizations.
Received multiple awards, including induction into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. I want to ask her about that one day. Dr. Green is also the immediate past chair of the Veterinary Innovation Council and has a special interest in the future of veterinary medicine and the innovations that will help ensure a thriving profession.
I hope I can get Dr. Green on the podcast to hear her full story, but now Dr. Green's veterinary trends for 2025.
The three big trends Dr. Greene sees for 2025. First up is digital health. The iPhone first came out in 2007. 2007. Think about that. And now we're looking at a complete revolution in how we monitor and treat patients. Wearables, patches, and even "Insideables" that can track everything from vital signs to [00:02:00] behavior patterns, catching problems before they become serious.
Digital health extends beyond the clinic walls. Virtual care is becoming more accepted, and we're seeing amazing tools that let us do comprehensive exams remotely. There's a device in human medicine called Tytocare that lets doctors perform complete remote exams. While we might not have the veterinary version in 2025, it is on the horizon.
The second category of trends is an AI integration. AI becomes a new personal assistant that handles all of the mundane paperwork while you focus on where you can offer the most value, caring for animals. It's already helping with image analysis, lab work, and medical scribing during appointments. The key thing to remember is that AI is meant to be our co pilot, not our replacement.
Finally, trends in veterinary education. This might not seem directly relevant to those of us already in practice, but it affects us all. We're seeing a [00:03:00] shift towards more active technology enhanced learning and things like virtual reality for surgical training and AI powered study tools. And there's a growing trend toward partnerships between veterinary schools and private practices, especially with the current faculty shortage crisis.
We actually talked about this in. Earlier trends episode, this could mean more opportunities for practitioners to get involved in teaching and research, creating a stronger bridge between academia and clinical practice. And I may add, maybe elaborate on your own personal career path. If you have an interest in teaching.
One of the most fascinating developments is the rise of the distributive model in veterinary education, where students get hands on experience in various private practices, rather than just university teaching hospitals. This is proving to be both cost effective and excellent for preparing students for real world practice.
There's something called Amer's Law that says we tend to [00:04:00] overestimate technology's short term impact while Underestimating its long term effects. So while some of these changes may seem overwhelming now, they're setting us up for an incredibly exciting future in veterinary medicine.
The bottom line for 2025, we're seeing better tools for patient care, more efficient ways to work and innovative approaches to education that will help prepare the next generation of veterinarians. The key is to stay curious, adaptable, and open to these possibilities while maintaining our commitment to excellent patient care.
Next, I have Dr. Adam Little, a veterinarian and entrepreneur known for his innovative approaches to animal and human health. Even in vet school, which was at the University of Guelph, he was highly curious about new ways to support animal health and veterinary medicine. He also is the first veterinarian to attend Singularity University focusing on the intersection of technology and health care. He served as the director of entrepreneurship and innovation at Texas A& M College of Veterinary [00:05:00] Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He co founded GoFetch, which supported significant cost savings and pet care for pet owners. And Dr. Little is continuing to share his Experience and brilliance and innovation and technology as a consultant.
In this episode, Dr. Little gives us a lot to soak in and think about. So I didn't want to overload this episode by adding much more. I will do a brief episode later in the week, reflecting on, on the series and sharing a few of my own predictions, but now strap in, grab a coffee. Here is Dr. Adam Little with his crystal ball of 2025.
Adam Little: There's maybe three topics that we could talk about. So I think the first one is we're going to start to see, a new form that the current dictation and scribe apps take, uh, specifically looking at how we make the jump between kind of dictation and more of that kind of personal assistant for vets.
And I think there's going to [00:06:00] be some really interesting implications for both. The existing kind of technology landscape, groups that own clinics, as well as the startup. So we can maybe break down what those three paths look like for those groups. So I think that will be probably the way through which a lot of practitioners begin to really harness and experience some of the new advances to AI. The second is, I think there'll be quite a lot of focus on new financial products and services for pet owners.
I think this year saw a lot of headwinds, for people's ability to just afford the care that their pets need. And we're going to begin to see some creative solutions. I think, this, idea of making pet health savings accounts tax free up to 1, 000, which looks maybe poised to pass next year. We'll probably unlock some different sorts of products that historically have not taken place within the profession have been available to pet owners.
And so you can imagine, for example, large employers ability to offer pet benefits. becomes a lot more interesting when it's kind of grouped as [00:07:00] real health savings account option. And I think that coupled with just the need for more creative solutions are going to spur some innovation there. and then the third part is I think that we're going to see maybe a bit of a bifurcation in some respects, around groups of veterinarians that really want to take more control over the future of their profession. So what I mean by that is there was a large there was a lot of cases and a lot of noise this year about things like V. C. P. R. regulations adjusting and lessening. In some cases, the mid level practitioner was another thing. And I think for a lot of veterinarians, it was maybe the first moment they kind of woke up and said, like, Hey, these are having some really big profound impacts on my profession. And like me, my colleagues feel differently about these things, like who's driving it. And starting to really realize that, you know, if you want to have more control over where things are going, we probably need to be more vocal and coordinated and active. coupled with kind of actively creating those [00:08:00] solutions, right?
So being a part of that change. And so what I'm hoping is that veterinarians sort of shift more from being kind of passengers of this future to driving it themselves. And in some cases that might be pushed back against, you know, some initiatives and some progress in other ways. It might mean that more things get created because veterinarians are actually in a position.
That actually couldn't drive these technologies, and I think that that's another kind of really interesting topic, especially when you look at, you know, clinic ownership is maybe another trend on top of that as well. So those are kind of three buckets.
Megan Sprinkle : I've definitely had some guests talk about the putting veterinarians in the driving
seat, especially when it comes to the practice side of
Adam Little: yeah,
Megan Sprinkle : So by all means, if there's one in particular that you are most excited
about, more involved in, please feel free to go a little bit deeper too.
Adam Little: yeah. Let's maybe talk about the AI scribes because I think, when you sort of look at where we are today, there's a couple of different, important, [00:09:00] ingredients of the story that are important to kind of call it. So the first is, I think in the last year we've gone from veterinarians, maybe not being aware that these tools exist, and now the market is effectively like flooded.
There's over a dozen companies that are offering this with some very high quality products. And. You've gone from veterinarians again, not even being aware that this exists, or probably having, you know, pretty reduced expectations to actually using these tools themselves. but I think a lot of people misunderstand where the space is.
They kind of look in some ways that this is like the finish line. So one thing you hear about a lot is, well, aren't all the practice management software companies and the larger players just going to kill these companies by effectively like building that functionality into their systems. And I fully expect, by the way, that that have to happen that they will build and incorporate those tools within their own systems.
And I think that will be a big trend this year, where some of the larger, more legacy companies will start to incorporate those sorts of capabilities in their existing tools. Um, I think another thing that you're seeing is, corporate groups and maybe some of these, uh, folks who actually own clinics actually [00:10:00] developing technologies for their respective practices.
So saying, look, the tools are now dropping in cost. They're becoming more powerful. We're just going to create them ourselves. And so that's kind of another maybe headwind for these players. But I think the third path is actually the most likely, which is that these scribing tools are going to evolve and morph to become the early indications of what will be an always on personalized operating system for individual vets.
And there's a couple of reasons I believe that. The first is, when you look at scribing today. It is effectively just kind of creating that medical note that don't get me wrong. It's an incredibly useful kind of primary use case. But there's a couple of really interesting components of those businesses that don't follow traditional veterinary software businesses.
So the first thing is, it's a piece of software that you can sell. And stand up as a veterinarian almost instantly. So if you take something like a reminder system or a booking system or any other piece of software, there's usually a lot of like workflow implementation. [00:11:00] You need to get a lots of people on board.
You need to integrate with the software systems. Scribing companies have been able to create value for the highest paid labor in a clinic instantaneously, without the permission of other people or the need to necessarily integrate with those technical systems as a requirement to get going. So that's one piece.
The second part is you don't necessarily have to train and get everybody on board. You can have one doctor in the practice to start using it and see that value. And so the ways in which they can get this technology and ultimately develop a relationship with it. With the end user being the veterinarian is quite unique, both in terms of how you can distribute it, how you can capture value and some of these additional use cases.
But then you start looking to say, like, what could we actually do with the medical record? And this is where I think the cases get really interesting. you can do things like decision support. You could automate all the tasks on top of a medical record or appointment related to client communication. You could start to weave in educational opportunities because in the future you'll be able to know exactly like what cases a doctor's seen, where they compare [00:12:00] to their colleagues, where's their gaps, where they're struggling, the sentiment of those conversations, were owner's angry or nervous, is that like a training opportunity?
Can you basically anticipate with a high degree of accuracy the veterinarian's next needs. And I think what you're going to start to see is a whole layer of new use cases that frankly make what we are doing today look pretty limited. And what's really important to understand, and it's a little bit serendipitous that we're talking today, OpenAI just released their O3 model today, the most powerful model that they've ever created.
And when you look at the investment that the world's biggest companies are putting into AI at the foundational layer, it means that every company in our space is going to be able to, if they choose, take advantage of the fact that intelligence is increasing incredibly quickly and the cost of these tools and the APIs are dropping very quickly as well. And so ultimately, what that means is more powerful tools that cost less to build in the hands of more people. And we're [00:13:00] going to start to see how by the time I think a lot of these more enterprise companies have built that education capability, 3, 4, 5 of these companies are already, you know, another 100 yards ahead.
And one of the best indicators of this is, despite having a lot of competition, Some of the most active investments in the space from a technology perspective, went to those companies being backed by some of the world's top venture capitalists. And what's important to recognize when you kind of zoom out a little bit is they're not banking on these companies, not investing in these companies, thinking that they're just going to be a little side app for a couple of veterinarians.
They're investing in them because they believe that in the future. These will be the systems that run practices that run cases that run basically, uh, the operating system of an entire veterinary, relationship and model. And so I think we're at early days for that, but that sort of future, I think we'll get, begin to emerge in a variety of forms over the next 12 months.
Megan Sprinkle : How seamlessly [00:14:00] will this feel for the veterinary team? Do you think it will be like, are people adapting a lot quicker now? Will this be pretty seamless? Do we have any examples for maybe human medicine?
Kind of? What are you like? How? How will the vet feel in this process?
Adam Little: So I think the fact there's some, I think the answer is, and I'll kind of explain why. It will feel as seamless as talking to the world's most informed colleague any time of day for any sort of case, and I'm very confident for a couple reasons. The first reason is that when you look at the adoption of scribe tools today.
It is following a quicker adoption path than any piece of technology that I've seen in veterinary medicine since I started my career. And partially it's because of some of the reasons that I mentioned before, which is that you don't need the permission of others. You don't need the technical integration in order to create value right off the bat.
It just takes one veterinarian to say, Hey, that's interesting. I want to start using that tool. So that's really important. [00:15:00] The second, the other reason that the adoption I think is important is because veterinarians are acutely aware and, uh, and, and, and suffer from The administration of their job and a lack of time.
And so it's not solving some fictional problem or some future problem. We're saying, Hey, you need to do this in order for the client to become more compliant in the future. It's saying, do you want to go home an hour earlier tomorrow? Like, here you go. So that's another piece of it. But the third part, which I think is a bigger societal change, which is that the way that we are interacting with computers, Is fundamentally changing and that's not going to just be a veterinary thing.
It's going to be things like Siri is going to become smarter. the ways in which you talk to computers are going to change. open AI recently released their advanced voice mode and you can talk to it. Like you're talking to a human and it understands pauses and inflections and it can always be on and you can use it to control your computer screen and you can use it for all these other features and functionality that previously would have seemed like science fiction [00:16:00] and so when you context switch them to your professional life.
The gap between that sort of benefit in your personal life and then going into a system where you're like, look, I gotta like rigidly like interact with these text boxes and this interface doesn't adjust to me and all these things. There's just gonna be a lot of pressure on creating experiences that meet a rising bar of expectations that people have for everything else that they touch and use. And veterinary medicine sort of experienced this a little bit during COVID, which accelerated things like prescription management and online booking and telemedicine where, hey, society forced us to adjust and maybe speed up some of the adoption of these new technologies.
But I think what's going to happen is you're going to start to see a whole bunch of other use cases that are as valuable, if not more valuable than just the dictation. The ability to summarize 100 pages of records instantaneously. The ability to run any case through algorithms that point out what else could be going on and what you might be missing.
the ability to pull out from a conversation with a pet owner all [00:17:00] the specific tasks that need to be done and then having those tasks almost done automatically. And so I think one of the examples that Sam Altman. who's the CEO of open AI recently shared that I think gives you an interesting spectrum of where we are and where we're going as he talked about this from the perspective of like booking a restaurant appointment and he said, you know, people look at AI and they want it to like book a dinner reservation.
Hey, you know, Book this for me. That's a pretty lame use case. The next step is I want you to book a dinner reservation, but I want you to know kind of my dietary preferences, my availability, where I am and book the perfect restaurant like kind of better than that, but still really lame. The next step is the A.
I can actually call every single restaurant. 300 restaurants instantaneously and find the perfect restaurant for the perfect time and actually booked that for you. And actually that's actually now possible, but also kind of pretty lame. And if you're one of the restaurants, you're looking at that saying, and this is kind of the end of the spectrum, I'm getting [00:18:00] 300 calls and I'm literally talking to an AI agent.
And what you start to realize is it's not your humans that are going to answering those AI phone calls. It's going to be your AI. That's interacting with that A. I. And it's going to force these interactions are going to force you and going to force us to adopt these tools because of the expectations and the use cases that people are bringing to us.
And if you flip that to a veterinary example, think of something like a complaint. Right? So we know with a level of accuracy, most states less than 10 complaints per, you know, X number of veterinarians, like, and those numbers have been increasing in some states, but it's, it's manageable. What happens when, with the click of a button, any pet owner can, Get a second opinion on any medical record that has ever been generated on their pet.
The AI can find all the mistakes that veterinarians made. They can draft the perfect letter with all the supporting information and send it to the state board. And they can say, this is what, what should have been done. And this is [00:19:00] what is missing. And the ease of generating that level of kind of robustness and that that frequency of complaints is something that now is like, will be a touch of a button.
The answer isn't for the regulators to comb through all these manually. It's to develop tools that can handle and analyze at scale the, the growth of complaints that might exist. Just as one small example. And, and I think that's really gonna put pressure where if you're a veterinary team that is trying to respond and handle this.
Based on your human capacity, where where pet owners are checking in maybe now once per week with AI generated messages, and you're responding to what clearly isn't the person or might be one of their AI agents. Your team is going to be forced to adopt new processes to be able to provide that personalized care that frequent touch point in a way that doesn't overwhelm the staff.
And so again, if you're a veterinarian who's already using these tools and augmenting yourself, your ability to outperform your colleagues, you're is going to be like orders of magnitude [00:20:00] and maybe the best example that I can think of that hopefully makes us really crystal clear is if you're not one of these practitioners that are using these tools, it will be akin to going to an accountant and the accountant telling you, you know what, I know there's calculators and this like Excel thing, but I love doing math by hand and I'm really good at it and I think it helps me us build this connection.
So I'm just going to do your taxes. On a notepad. Today, you look at that accountant and be like, I'm going to report you. And there's no way I would ever use you. Right. Because they're not using those capable tools. And I think increasingly we're going to start to see that divide where for veterinarians who aren't taking advantage of these capabilities, it will be the same as veterinarians who are not leveraging the latest medical advances, and I think when you look at the time between when something is introduced to when it gets adopted to when it becomes the gold standard to where it's actually malpractice if you don't do that thing, whether that's like pain management for post [00:21:00] surgical care that loop is going to shrink considerably. It won't be entire careers anymore. It might not even be a decade. And so as a profession, we are going to need to keep up with a level of advancement, not just driven by internally our own professional and our gold standards and our medical cases, but by the expectations of pet owners, that is far more aggressive, far more rapid and far more disruptive.
And if you're in an environment that precludes you or prevents you from using these tools. You are going to be like practicing without a stethoscope and that period of change is going to happen incredibly quickly and we're just beginning to see this and the last thing I will say just as like one really other piece of evidence is that the world's biggest companies that developed products that are used by billions of people each day are investing more money in this technology than anything in human history. And they're the ones that are predicting within the next couple of years, we will start to see clear evidence of artificial general intelligence. And I can assure you that those companies are not thinking through all the [00:22:00] intricacies of what this means for veterinary medicine.
It's up to us. And so they're going to create these technologies that are going to be freely used by not just professionals, but by average people. And we, as a profession, not have to be not just ready to embrace them, but actively take advantage of their capabilities to help create the future that we want to practice in.
And I think that's going to be, start to emerge this year. And that's part of the reason why, when people are like, well, the big companies are just going to build dictation into their software systems. And it's going to kill these next 10. It's like whack a mole. And the next version will be even better.
So that's a little bit of where that's coming from.
Megan Sprinkle : Yeah. And just to go back, you know, 'cause I, I think we share a love of a, of a
quote, , and that is the best way to predict the future is to create it.
It's a call for veterinarians. And the whole veterinary team
to learn more, speak up
on what the needs [00:23:00] are and not for this to be scary
Cause ultimately I hope
that this also helps us focus more on the human element
of the need of patient care, because yes, we love that we can get quick
answers and we can get diagnostic things. And but ultimately, we still want to go to the veterinarian for the human connection piece, too, because we need
that as well. If we can spend more time on that part and go home on time, everyone hopefully will be happy.
Adam Little: Yeah, it gives you, I think it gives individuals a lot more agency to be able to actually solve their problems. Whether that's somebody who is a practice manager that has not been able to like write the practice handbook because they're overwhelmed with a bunch of pieces and now has an AI assistant that can do that or a new veterinarian who's struggling with a really complicated case or a CSR who just had a really angry client and it's like all she or he can think about.
And now there's some, there's a way to kind of offload. And in some ways, work with you to [00:24:00] help respond to somebody in a personalized way. I think the really power, the power of these tools is that they can be democratized and they can be personalized to your specific needs. And I think that's where the opportunities become really significant.
And then to your point about the human connection, it allows us to double down on the things that make us unique and human at like a very like biological, like viseral level. And I think one of the cool things about veterinary medicine is that we've always had to adapt and change. Veterinary medicine is composed of thousands of individualized unique tasks, which in many ways make us irreplaceable.
The idea is to double down on the things that make us unique instead of fighting the things that frankly will become tasks that we won't do anymore. and I think that there's something really meaningful about being at this inflection point in the profession where we get an opportunity to decide what those tasks are and what, what kind of veterinary medicine we want to practice into the future.
So I'm hoping that that becomes to be something that is a charge [00:25:00] more veterinarians publicly and vocally take up.
Megan Sprinkle : Like I said, a lot to soak in. I hope you enjoyed and are inspired by this series, Looking Into 2025, by people I admire very greatly. I want to thank all of the guests who agreed to be part of this. I loved seeing the enthusiasm around the responses. I also don't thank them enough, but thank you to all of the podcast supporters.
We have several who supported the podcast in 2024 from a financial support, like Fire Consulting and Will Hughes. And that was through the Buzzsprout platform, which you can do also in the show notes below. Also for those who recommended guests and reach out to tell me how much you are enjoying the podcast words cannot express my full appreciation.
We are just getting started this year. So follow, subscribe, listen, and watch. We have an exciting year ahead together.
