At 2am an emergency vet meets a seizing dog she has never seen before. The dog has nine years of medical history: vaccines, bloodwork, two prior clinics, a chronic medication. Tonight, functionally, none of it exists. If the records come at all, they come the next morning by fax or PDF.
After a decade building trusted systems for human health, for safety and in other domains, and the last few years working inside animal health, this is the thing that still stops me. There are more than 30,000 veterinary practices in the US running on 100+ different record systems, with no shared standard like the HL7/FHIR rails human medicine runs on. The systems don't just fail to connect. The profession never even agreed on vocabulary. The same presentation gets charted as “vomiting,” “emesis,” or “V+” depending on the clinic.
Here's the part I find genuinely revealing. Veterinary medicine has no HIPAA equivalent. For years people assumed health data doesn't flow because privacy law makes sharing hard. Vet med is the natural experiment: almost no privacy constraint, and still no sharing. Which tells you the barrier was never regulation. Human medicine only got interoperability because the government paid for it and then mandated it (HITECH, meaningful use). No such forcing function ever arrived for animals, and an individual clinic gains almost nothing from adopting a system that talks to its competitor across town.
The market is now “solving” this in a specific way worth watching. Corporate and private-equity ownership of US clinics went from roughly 8% in 2011 to about half by 2025, and Mars alone operates around 3,000 hospitals through Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl. Inside those networks, records (sometimes) do follow the patient. Consolidation in theory is building interoperability, but as proprietary islands. The pet's history becomes an asset of the chain, not of the animal.
Three things I've come to believe about this:
- The absence of a record standard is an animal welfare issue, not an IT annoyance. Repeated bloodwork, missed drug interactions, and blind emergency handoffs all trace back to it.
- It is also a public health issue. Dogs and cats are sentinels for zoonotic disease, and surveillance can't run on 30,000 silos.
- Anyone praying for a HITECH-style mandate should study what it did to human clinicians first. The same law that connected hospitals also chained doctors to click-heavy EHRs and gave us documentation burnout. If vet med ever gets its interoperability moment, the design question is how to move data without importing that misery.
The strange comfort is that veterinary medicine gets to go second. It can watch two decades of human health IT, keep the standard, and skip the suffering. Whether anyone with the leverage to do that has the incentive to do it is another question, and I'm not sure the answer is yes.
What would make an independent clinic want its data to leave the building? That's the question I keep turning over.
Sources
The three layers of veterinary software
IEEE Pulse, Electronic health records in veterinary medicine