I in marketing—sounds like a pleasurable escape in a sci-fi movie, right? Well, it’s not just a futuristic fantasy; it’s here! And, it’s transforming how we do business—especially in the veterinary world. But, like any tool, AI is only as good as the hands that wield it. In this article, we’ll explore the magic of AI in marketing and why the right prompts are your secret weapon.

AI can analyze data and automate tasks like a champ, but it can also miss the mark without proper guidance. Your job? To be the guiding star that steers AI clear of the junk and towards the gold.

Ask Detailed Questions:

True AI remembers your clinic’s quirks and preferences, stays sharp and up-to-date, and keeps your marketing fresh, relevant and effective. Using fake AI is like using a rusty, old typewriter in a world of sleek laptops.

Predictive analytics, personalized client communication and automated client management are just the beginning. Stay informed with what’s on the AI horizon with webinars and courses, learn from others’ experiences in online communities, and use AI prompt guides and templates as your ready-made helpers. In no time you’ll be riding the crest of the AI wave.

And remember, mastering AI prompting and marketing isn’t just about getting the tech right; it’s about strategy and finesse on top of the technical. With the right prompts, you can turn AI into your marketing sidekick or even co-manager, ensuring your campaigns are sharp, relevant and engaging. Embrace the power of precise prompting and watch your marketing results soar!

In 2010, the American Board of Veterinary Specialties provisionally recognized the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, with full recognition in 2018. Rehabilitation today continues to grow and develop and is often the gateway for multimodal pain management in equine and canine patients.³

Innovative devices have taken a crucial role in veterinary rehabilitative care. These tools, such as lasers for photobiomodulation therapy, extracorporeal shockwave machines, pulsed electromagnetic field devices and underwater treadmills, have significantly improved patient care. As the field continues to advance, we have new AI-driven options that can help us evaluate our patients, providing a level of care that was previously unimaginable.

roto presents people, or animals, in volumetric 4K. When a person beams somewhere live, they can see and hear the people they are interacting with in real time,” explains David Nussbaum, CEO and Inventor of Proto Hologram. “When Dr. Bressler interacts with a client and their pet, it’s exactly as if the pet is in the room with her.

As owner of House Call Veterinarian in New York City and the preferred vet of many pet-owning celebrities in the Hamptons, Dr. Cindy Bressler was determined to find a faster and more accurate way to help pets when seconds count.

“We’d ask people to send photos or videos so we could see what was going on,” Dr. Bressler explains, “And then I realized when I’d see the animal in person, it would be a much different situation than I thought. I was worried the info I was working with when people would send stuff in wasn’t accurate enough.

“Now with Proto,” she continues “I can get a much more real view of what’s going on. It’s not just a close-up of a bump or wound; it’s how the pet is moving and interacting with its owner. I’ll tell the client to have the pet walk to them, or show me how he is breathing, or how he reacts to you touching his paw. With holograms I can see so much more. This is hugely important when someone can’t get into the office soon enough or we can’t get to them.”

“Proto is great for things like re-checks—say a dog has orthopedic surgery—a week later, two weeks later, you can monitor it,” she says. “You can gain so much from seeing how they’re moving, how much weight they put on their leg, and things like that.

“Another area is neurological situations, which are very hard for a client to explain on the phone,” Dr. Bressler continues. “Not everything is cut and dry like a full-blown seizure. A dog could be licking the air, or what we call fly-biting, and other things that are hard to describe. With Proto, you can capture behaviors much more accurately than people can describe.”

Dr. Bressler did her internship and residency in small animal internal medicine at the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan, but says she will see any animal in an emergency.

This commitment was sparked at a very young age when Dr. Bressler took her sick childhood pet gerbil to the vet.

“The vet said, ‘I don’t treat gerbils,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘You’re an animal doctor, you should treat all animals.’ I took her home and she died the next day. So I knew I wanted to be a vet and that when I became one, I would always take care of all animals.”

Dr. Bressler spent much of her free time volunteering at local veterinary hospitals, but when she found out that to apply to vet school you have to have worked on a farm or with zoo animals too, she began volunteering at the Staten Island Zoo and working with other large animal vets to get that experience.

From there, Dr. Bressler went to Atlantic Veterinary College on Prince Edward Island, which was a brand-new school in 1990.

“It was small so we got a ton of individualized attention,” she explains. “And I was happy to have peers working hard, with the same interests as me, for the first time in my life there.”

Now a typical day for Dr. Bressler begins around 7 a.m. when the phone starts ringing, and often lasts late into the night with so many emergencies to respond to.

In an effort to save even more pets’ lives, Dr. Bressler is working on opening the first-ever 24-hour emergency vet hospital in Watermill, NY, which will service the South Fork of Long Island.

“Currently the closest emergency hospital is an hour away, and a lot of pets don’t make it,” she shares.

Dr. Bressler’s patient care doesn’t stop at just handing emergencies. With help from colleagues around the country, she’s dedicated to making sure her patients receive top-notch care, no matter where they are.

When a pet’s life does sadly come to an end, there’s another use case of Pronto that’s different from diagnosis and care. In addition to recording holograms for symptom and recovery monitoring, anything a pet owner wants to capture can be recorded to keep the pet’s memory alive forever.

“You can record all these little things that only your pet does in its own way and a hologram really preserves it,” Dr. Bressler explains. “People love their animals so much—the grief process is very hard—so this is a new way to help with that loss.”

With a promise to herself at a very young age to help all animals, Dr. Cindy Bressler has certainly stuck to her commitment. And with the help of the innovative hologram technology available through Proto, and her unique, personalized ways of providing care, Dr. Bressler can help even more pets live longer, healthier lives.

LLMs break down text into “tokens”–which can be words or chunks of words–and use probabilities to predict the next token.

any veterinarians have been reaping the benefits of new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for over a year now. And thanks to large language models (LLMs), vets can drastically reduce the amount of time they spend each day writing records. These tools quickly transcribe audio recordings from veterinary consultations into comprehensive and accurate medical records.

LLMs are a type of AI that have been trained using vast amounts of text data, enabling them to learn tasks such as predicting the next word in a sentence based on context. Models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are notable examples, and modern veterinary scribe startups utilize this same underlying technology.

LLMs break down text into “tokens”—which can be words or chunks of words—and use probabilities to predict the next token. For example, if given the tokens “The cat is,” the model might predict “hungry” or “sleeping” as the next word based on learned probabilities. To enhance their human-like qualities, these models incorporate “sampling” to add randomness, preventing repetitive and robotic text generation. Beyond text production, LLMs are also used in modern-day transcribing, converting audio recordings into written form.

LLMs facilitate the creation of medical records by summarizing lengthy consultation transcripts, identifying pertinent information and filtering out irrelevant content. Most existing LLMs were trained on more generalist content, so they may misinterpret or misspell veterinary words, but this is changing with the rise of models that are trained on more specific content.

Of course, many practitioners have been using AI-powered tools for image analysis for a few years now. Scribes and image analysis are only the beginning. Expect many AI tools to emerge over the next short while to help with many elements of practice administration—tasks such as ensuring there are no missed billable items on client invoices, managing insurance claims, coordinating employee rosters and tracking specialist referrals.

AI also has a significant role to play in the critical but often intractable issue of treatment compliance, as well as in improving client communications. Vets will be able to leverage AI’s ability to quickly create tailored client summaries, enhancing the level of personalized care and client buy-in. It also has the ability to “learn” about habits and behaviors that may interfere with client compliance, and counteract them with personalized communication strategies in the home setting.

From a clinical standpoint, AI’s unprecedented pattern recognition abilities will prove useful as a diagnostic aide and assistant in case management. While it may never substitute the intricate and nuanced clinical reasoning of a veterinarian, it does have the potential to augment such decisions. These are exciting times ahead, both from a clinical perspective and also in terms of the impact that reduced workloads will have on veterinary morale and workplace satisfaction.

remember driving to work on March 12th, 2020, the day a public health emergency was declared in my city. I walked into an eerily quiet clinic and gathered with my coworkers, waiting to discuss how we were going to proceed. For the next year and beyond, work and life took on a bizarre, unfamiliar shape. I fortunately came through without suffering any major personal tragedies, and slowly pieces of pandemic life fell away. On May 11th, 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officially ended the Covid-19 public health emergency.

With the pandemic behind us, where are we now? Is everything back to normal?

Well, not exactly…

The American Psychological Association’s “Stress In America 2023” report reveals evidence of long-term stress that psychologists are identifying as effects of collective trauma. The percent of adults who rated their stress an eight out of 10 or higher has increased in nearly all age groups (the exception was 65+). The pandemic is not the only source of stress. Stress regarding media, finances, family responsibilities and discrimination are all cited as having increased since 2019.¹

The physical and psychological impacts of this stress are significant. Chronic stress is linked to inflammation, heart disease, digestive issues and a host of other ailments. This is reflected in an increase in chronic illnesses since the pandemic.

Our psychological health has also suffered. Reported incidence of diagnoses of mental illnesses has increased, and a third of adults surveyed report being too stressed to think about the future. Mental health conditions can impair executive functioning, making it challenging for individuals to concentrate, plan and organize in everyday life. They can also affect emotional regulation and decrease one’s ability to cope with unexpected situations, increasing stress and challenges associated with interpersonal interactions.

Stress can even physically affect your brain, contributing to loss of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. This loss may decrease cognitive function and impair working memory, negatively impacting an individual’s ability to learn, recall and concentrate.² Ironically, chronic stress even damages the part of our brain we need in order to manage and recognize stress, making it even harder to regain normal functioning.

It is important to acknowledge that even though the acute panic of the pandemic is over, people are still dealing with stress and trauma. We can help one another by being patient and acknowledging the real difficulties that follow such a huge life event. Recognizing that someone’s perceived inattentiveness, “brain fog,” decreased motivation or emotional dysregulation may have a root cause helps us remain empathetic. We should similarly respond to our own struggles with compassion.

Professional mental health support is also an important component of processing and coping with change, trauma and stress. It is common to feel you are not “stressed enough” to seek help—two-thirds of adults in the APA survey said as much—but anyone who feels they need support should not hesitate to turn to a professional. We all carry the effects of what we have lived through, and learning to manage that is part of moving forward.

As much as you might want that 10-p.m. donut, it’s important to recognize that no one really wants to be working that late, especially at donut-shop wages. People are weighing the costs and benefits of work differently now than they did before the pandemic, and the benefits are frequently coming up short. With cost of living—especially housing costs—skyrocketing, employees in many industries are struggling to keep up, and veterinary medicine is no exception.

In addition, veterinary professionals, like much of the general population, often struggle with work-life balance. Burnout and compassion fatigue are still the top two wellness issues cited by veterinary technicians in the NAVTA survey. Work-life balance is generally considered a key factor in preventing burnout, and since the pandemic, many industries are finding it in remote or hybrid work. And while remote work is not an option widely available in veterinary medicine, there are other ways to encourage balance.

“The Merck Animal Health 2023 Veterinary Wellbeing Study” revealed that fewer veterinarians are working evenings, weekends, holidays or extended hours than in previous years.⁴ Decreased work hours can free up time for family, friends, exercise and sleep, all activities associated with lower burnout. Other ways to improve work-life balance include supporting and using paid time off, respecting and establishing boundaries regarding workplace relationships and expectations, and avoiding communication about workplace concerns outside of scheduled work hours.

Some clinics are utilizing video appointments to increase availability and accessibility of veterinary care, mirroring their increased use in human healthcare. Video appointments can reduce stress for some patients and allow clients to have their pet seen who may otherwise struggle to fit a veterinary appointment into their busy schedule.

While there are a growing number of companies offering opportunities to connect virtually with a vet, the AVMA recommends telehealth, with the exception of teleadvice and teletriage, be conducted within an existing Veterinary-Client-Patient-Relationship (VCPR).⁵ It is important to consider legal concerns regarding telemedicine, which may vary from state to state.

Another technology making waves is artificial intelligence. While AI has been around in some form for decades, 2023 marked a massive increase in its use and relevance. With AI technology ranging from predictive text and customer support chatbots to performing surgery, the possibilities, as well as concerns, are extensive.

Daily applications for streamlining tasks such as voice-to-text technology are largely welcomed by busy veterinary professionals. And while AI may be a matter of convenience for some, for others, it can offer a step toward inclusion. Voice technology, transcription, translation and virtual assistant programs all have great potential to reduce barriers for a wide range of individuals.

1. American Psychological Association. (2023, November). Stress in America 2023: A nation recovering from collective trauma. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2023/collective-trauma-recovery
2. McPhillips, D. (2023, March 7). Stress may lead to lower cognitive function, study finds. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/health/high-stress-lower-cognition-study-wellness/index.html
3. NAVTA 2022 Demographic Survey Results. (2023, February 13). National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America. https://drive.google.com/file/d/11pmYzIouybfL55YsduRbaZ1TtMD1i2DB/view
4. Improving Wellbeing and Mental Health: Merck Animal Health 2023 Veterinary Wellbeing Study. (2024). Merck Animal Health. https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/offload-downloads/2023-vet-wellbeing-presentation
5. Telemedicine. American Veterinary Medical Association. https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/avma-policies/telemedicine

rtificial intelligence (AI) technology is showing big promise in veterinary medicine by improving diagnostic testing, imaging, client communication and drug research.

A prime example of this is AI chatbots and virtual assistants. They offer preliminary assessments and telemedicine services, providing crucial support to urgent care veterinarians by helping prioritize cases. Additionally, they give pet owners immediate guidance, enabling them to make informed decisions when a vet is not readily available.

Dr. Terry Fossum, board-certified veterinary surgeon and CEO of Dr. Fossum’s Pet Care, notes radiology and pathology are two areas that AI has been successfully implemented as a diagnostic tool.

“AI algorithms are used to analyze X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and ultrasounds, helping veterinarians detect abnormalities such as tumors, fractures, or internal injuries more quickly and accurately than manual analysis,” she explains. “The development of imaging modalities with embedded AI is increasing and may allow for early detection of cancer, which would be potentially life-saving for many of our patients.”

AI is also used in labs for analyzing blood work and other diagnostic tests, and can assist in examining cytology or histopathology slides, detecting patterns indicative of diseases such as cancer or infections.

“The quicker turnaround time benefits patients, as they receive faster, more accurate diagnosis and treatment,” she says. “Veterinarians appreciate being able to complete the patient examination, receive diagnostic results, and implement treatment within a single veterinary visit.”

Another potential risk is protecting data and keeping medical records confidential. Therefore, it is recommended that veterinarians avoid over-relying on AI tools and should always use their professional judgment.

Dr. Sehaj Grewal, DVM, a veterinarian in Los Angeles known as “The Melrose Vet,” echoes this, saying, “AI should only be used as a tool to aid experienced veterinarians but cannot replace the skill and expertise of a vet and their staff. AI systems are not a one-size-fits-all solution. While they can gather and analyze data quickly, AI may struggle with more complex cases or lesser-known symptoms or diseases not represented in the training data. Other limitations include the high cost to implement these technologies, which may make them less accessible to individual vets or smaller practices.”

Dr. Nell Ostermeier, DVM and veterinary advisor at Figo Pet Insurance, notes there are numerous ethical considerations around who owns the data and security associated with the patient and client (pet owner) information.

“There is also the fact that, for humans, AI in medicine is regulated by the FDA, whereas there is no regulatory body in veterinary medicine yet,” he says.

Keep in mind, in order for AI to produce high-quality results, the algorithms need to be fed reliable data in a standardized format. So, the general lack of standardization of medical records and coding in many veterinary practices may create a massive challenge.

Plus, Dr. Fossum adds that implementation of new technology can be a relatively heavy lift.

“Integration with current systems in your practice is one of the main issues that you will face,” she warns. “In addition, training employees can be very challenging and expensive. You need to get the ‘buy-in’ from your entire team to ensure that everyone is using the technology appropriately. They should understand the risks and benefits associated with using AI.”

“AI isn’t perfect and it can cause trust and reliability issues with veterinary staff,” Dr. Fossum says. “A hybrid approach of not totally relying on AI but instead using it as an additional tool may be the most logical way to implement AI now. Over time, veterinarians will likely gain more comfort with the technology.”

“The future of AI will be prevention,” Dr. Grewal forecasts. “AI’s predictive models will be able to help with early disease detection, as well as personalized therapies and treatment plans. Also, AI used in wearables (dog or cat collars) can analyze data from the device in real time, which makes health monitoring more accurate.”

In the future, Dr. Hunt believes AI may be used to assist with medication recommendations for patients with conditions that have multiple medication options.

“Cancer medications could be recommended on the basis of the patient’s demographics, clinical signs, and diagnostic testing,” she says. “These treatments could dramatically improve the effectiveness of existing drug therapies once implemented.”

The potential for AI to transform veterinary practices is significant, but ongoing research and development are crucial to fully understand and harness its capabilities.

“The best way to stay up to date is to read industry trade publications, attend conferences, and sign up for classes on the latest technology,” Dr. Grewal notes. “A good vet is always a student, forever learning and improving on their skills.”