Custom Veterinary Software Development

Veterinary software is evolving rapidly thanks to advancements in AI. How is the veterinary management software market changing? What features are vet clinic software developers adding to their products? What do customers of software for veterinarians like, and what don't they? This overview is helpful not only for those looking to buy ready-made veterinary computer software but also for startup founders planning to create innovative veterinary management solutions. To succeed, they need to understand current market trends and future expectations.

Veterinary Software Market

The amount spent on pets is constantly increasing, driving growth in the relevant market. The U.S. has the highest number of veterinary clinics and veterinarians, which explains why the top animal healthtech companies are based there.

Some researchers estimated that the global veterinary software market would reach nearly USD 1.5 billion in 2024 and predict an annual growth rate of over 10%, making this market promising for innovative startups.

Modern veterinary Practice Management Software is cloud-based and must address the following:

• Administrative tasks: billing and invoicing, resource management, inventory control.
• Clinical tasks: treatment procedure management, tracking health conditions.
• Communication tasks: online appointment booking, email or SMS reminders, and patient portals.

It should also integrate with various external databases and third-party platforms (imaging, telehealth, finance & analytics, insurance, medical records, client communication tools, payment, controlled drugs management, diagnostics, online pharmacy, patient care, reference labs, etc.) and have built-in data analysis capabilities for insights into patient demographics, treatment outcomes, or clinic performance.

Recently, veterinary software has gained a new wave of development due to advancements in AI. New projects in this field focus on implementing:

• Predictive analytics to identify at-risk patients and prevent diseases.
• Machine learning (ML) for early and timely diagnosis using medical images (MRI and X-rays).
• AI-powered chatbots to improve client communication, provide veterinary assistance, and deliver personalized treatment plans.

Regarding the target buyers of such software, there are two key categories:

1. Veterinary hospitals and clinics that handle a high patient volume and increased patient load. Their software must support operations in surgery, imaging, emergency care, and specialized treatments.
2. Smaller practices or individual veterinarians treating small animals (dogs and cats, as well as small mammals, reptiles, birds, aquatics, and exotic pets). Ownership of exotic pets is a growing trend, further increasing demand in this segment.

Covetrus Pulse Veterinary Management Software

Covetrus is probably the most well-known among brands of veterinary management software in the market. It has raised a total of $292 million over seven funding rounds. Let’s take a look at their product. We’ll focus on the design and description of the interfaces for its most basic features.

Patient's Dashboard

The patient's dashboard highlights a pet’s status (hospitalized, ready for checkout, etc.), weight trend, core vaccines with expiration dates, reminders for procedures or vaccinations, as well as a visits log. It also integrates with the prescription management module to create and synchronize prescriptions.

Patients' Dashboard

The whiteboard dashboard contains all the important details for each patient—name, species, breed, weight, and gender—along with their appointment type, current status, assigned veterinarian, and location within the clinic. It also includes a filter to prioritize patients. Users can view and update treatments or tasks for each patient by clicking the "+" button. The comments section provides additional information on the patient's condition.

Communication Dashboard

The SMS client dashboard allows staff to send text messages directly to clients through the veterinary practice management software. They can select which phone number to use if multiple numbers are listed. A pre-filled text box is available for composing or editing the message before sending. This communication is linked to the patient's record on the whiteboard.

Prescription Dashboard

The prescription dashboard allows veterinarians to easily create prescription requests for a patient. The interface displays patient details (weight, breed, and medical status) and connects the patient to their owner. They can adjust details (dosage or refills) before finalizing the prescription. Once approved, the prescription can be sent directly to the Online Pharmacy module, enabling clients to place an order for the medication.

Veterinary Management Software Reviews

What paying customers disliked about veterinary management software? This is a potential area for improvement by the current vendor or ideas for implementation by new startups. Below is the information from verified user comments posted on SoftwareAdvice.

Performance

Customers don't like when veterinary software is time-consuming (too many button clicks, dozens steps for every one thing you need to do), glitchy, freezing too often, extremely slow, and when it includes many clunky, difficult processes that require tech support.

Veterinary clinic staff hate when veterinary software crashes while generating and sending medical records, and when it takes a very long time to complete the process, so they have to send several times records by segments.

Search

They complain about the poor search functionality. When trying to find clients, patients, or codes, the veterinary software may populate everything containing those letters. It’s difficult for them to search a patient’s medical history since there may be no search bar to look up specific words like “exam” without scrolling through the entire history.

Invoicing

The invoicing functionality may be so rigid in veterinary software that there’s no simple way to add or remove items from an invoice, return items, issue refunds, or void payments. Customers can’t perform basic actions like attaching a PDF to invoice items to comply with Lizzie’s Law. The process of adding or removing services after they’ve been added to an invoice is too time-consuming. Clients can’t change the billing doctor during checkout with one click – they must manually update every single item in the invoice individually.

Scheduling

The veterinary software may lack a reschedule button. Because of this, clients have to cancel the appointment and return to the medical record to create a new one.

Integrations

Clients are dissatisfied with how veterinary software sets up integrations with third-party tools. In their opinion, many integrations do not work correctly or reliably. Additionally, clients often use software that isn’t included in the official list of integrations.

Customer Service

Customer service operates may operate formally, make promises for improvements, but months pass, and nothing changes. That’s the best-case scenario – often, they simply say the requested functionality isn’t supported and tell users to figure it out themselves. Moreover, when updates do happen, users feel that they’ve made the situation worse rather than better.

Migrations

The transition from other vendors isn’t smooth. Many data pieces often don’t migrate at all and need to be entered manually.

Other frustrating issues

• Deceased pets cannot be hidden from the client’s active account.
• Not all dog breeds are listed for selection when creating a profile.
• Mass updating of inventory, labs, or services is unavailable. Users have to click "edit" for each item, make the changes, then save and close before moving on to the next.

Veterinary Clinical Trials Software

Veterinary clinical trials software is a type of veterinary software in the form of a database web application that matches veterinary patient data with certain types of diseases (e.g., canine cancer) and corresponding medications. After treating such patients, the software collects outcome data in the form of analytical reports, which are then transferred to relevant drug development and pharmaceutical companies. The core of this business essentially boils down to conducting contract research on behalf of those companies.

Thus, the key functions of such systems are (1) databases to determine which pets might be good to recruit for trials and (2) reports with testing results.

Let's take a more detailed look at how veterinary clinical trials software works.

This topic is well described in the Nature  journal, so here we will provide only a summary.

Client-owned pets with confirmed naturally occurring diagnoses are integrated into the veterinary clinical trials database from veterinary care centers, veterinary hospitals, etc., along with the results of DNA sequencing.

Veterinarians then gain access to targeted experimental drugs/therapies from pharmaceutical companies, which can be prescribed to their patients based on DNA sequencing results.

Medications are administered to dogs by their owners at home, and clinics later collect the treatment results.

Subsequently, such proprietary clinical trial management software gathers clinical updates and outcomes, providing this data back to pharmaceutical companies. Over time, all findings are then integrated into a proprietary dataset that improves the predictive accuracy of preclinical testing for drug development, informing pharmaceutical discovery, drug label extensions, and biomarker-driven therapies.

Veterinary Radiology AI Software

Veterinary radiology AI software is a type of veterinary software. Basically, it’s a reporting software, and the reports’ UX can vary significantly. However, reporting is not the only functionality. More importantly, the core of the software lies in the embedded AI. Veterinary radiology AI software may be based on several types of AI techniques and models tailored to medical imaging. The specific AI types depend on the software's objectives and may include convolutional neural networks, deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, ensemble models, and explainable AI.

The core of Veterinary Radiology AI Software consists of classifiers (abdominal, thoracic, etc.) - AI algorithms capable of assigning labels (categories) to input data based on patterns learned during training. These classifiers focus on conditions that signal complex abnormalities. They assist in identifying signs that may indicate negative processes and changes commonly linked to systemic or localized diseases, chronic diseases, obstruction, dysfunction, motility issues, or other serious conditions. Based on this information, veterinarians can quickly assess disease severity, prioritize treatment options, and determine the need for referral to specialty care or further diagnostics. Classifiers should be regularly fine-tuned. Often, such startups hire board-certified veterinary radiologists to contribute to building and validating such classifiers.

A patient's outcome could depend on a rapid report and second opinion. Veterinary radiology AI complements the urgent work of radiologists in animal hospitals, especially for clinics that lack a dedicated expert in veterinary radiology. SignalRAY, one of the vendors of veterinary radiology AI software, published peer-reviewed research in which they tried to understand whether the radiological interpretations made by veterinary radiologists are better or worse than those made by AI software. The key finding is that AI performs “almost as well as the highest-performing radiologist”. However, it does not provide a complete replacement. A similar report can be found from another vendor, Vetology. AI can also be used to integrate medical histories during the radiological interpretation and compare radiographic results.

The first generation of veterinary radiology AI software is already commercially available. In fact, as a product, they provide board-certified expertise enhanced by AI-powered insights, rather than rely solely on machine interpretations.

Veterinary radiology AI platforms can be integrated with X-ray, ultrasound, CT, and MRI machines, as well as with veterinary practice management systems to submit studies automatically. They can also receive radiographs through direct uploads. AI automatically scans every X-ray and delivers near-instant assessments of critical conditions. If any issues are detected (obstruction, heart failure, or GDV), they are flagged immediately for the care team to prioritize urgent cases.

The key value for veterinarians — the buyers of this software—is that the report is ready within 5 – 10 minutes during a patient's visit. After generation, the reports are added to the platform, emailed to the necessary email addresses, and synced with a specific veterinary clinic's PMS.

How Belitsoft Can Help

Belitsoft develops custom cloud-based veterinary software on demand. We provide developers, designers, and project managers to improve existing software, modernize it, or create it entirely from scratch.

We help develop custom veterinary management software with features like appointment scheduling, medical records management, reporting and analytics, compliance and documentation, workflow automation, staff management, lab integration, and insurance processing. We can also implement advanced features such as telemedicine services (video and chat consultations, automated email invites, two-way texting, and video launch from calendars), pet portals (tracking pet health records, nutrition, and treatment plans), prescription management (automated e-prescribing, and automated re-ordering), accounting and billing modules (automating payment processing, invoice generation, and expense tracking), inventory management systems, pet GPS tracking.

Our software engineers help build custom veterinary clinical trial software to manage study design, trial execution, and reporting. It allows users to manage and track animal patients’ health status, treatment schedules, and response to therapies (including analytics on trial progress and animal health outcomes). They can integrate it with EMR and other veterinary health systems, ensure compliance with industry-specific regulations and standards, and add features like communication among research teams, and veterinary professionals.