Last week we were treated to an excellent Member Spotlight presentation by Dr. Gil Patterson, Chief Medical Officer for Food Animal Services at VetNOW. VetNOW is a medical technology company that helps veterinarians expand their reach and provide better service. Here are six key takeaways I learned during the presentation:
- VetNOW started as a telemedicine company but is migrating into the medical technology space by incorporating new technologies, such as sensors, and databases and integrating them to provide more tools to the veterinarian.
- A variety of factors, such as a shortage of veterinarians, industry demands for increased levels of expertise, market volatility, increasing regulations, and constraints such as distance, impact food production systems with the result that they may face limited veterinary care.
- For some food production systems, such as the aquaculture farm example described in the presentation, a veterinarian may have to go to extraordinary lengths to get to the production site.
- Treatment decisions can have significant impact: a treatment decision for a 1,000 head herd of cows can affect over 1.7 million meals.
- Telemedicine is not intended to replace in-person, on-farm visits, but remote access to care can be advantageous in situations where biosecurity is a concern. Telemedicine may also offer advantages in terms of increasing practitioner efficiency, improving record keeping, leveraging data and experience to help inform decisions, and providing a bigger picture across a system or region.
- Use cases for telemedicine in animal health include post-surgery check in, reminders, checking in on treatment compliance, checking in on wound healing or chronic issues, responding to outstanding questions, and more.
- Bonus takeaway: VetNOW has been implemented by about 50 veterinary practices and is running swine production field trials this year.
Check out the recording of the VetNOW Member Spotlight to learn more about the company and its technology platform.