Morning, noon and night, if you have a pet, you will need a veterinarian. Recently Florida and California passed bills that give tele-health providers the permission to practice veterinary medicine with the ability to establish a veterinary-client-patient-relationship (VCPR) online. A VCPR allows veterinarians to provide diagnoses, treatment plans, and prescriptions virtually. This is new territory in veterinary medicine and we would like to break this down for you. 

Let’s start with what we do. Pets After Dark is a veterinary tele-health provider.  We are available to provide after-hours expert advice by licensed veterinarians from across the Greater Pittsburgh Area. What we can’t and don’t do is prescribe medication, diagnose or suggest treatment plans. So, how are we of any value? Funny you should ask.  If you suspect your pet is sick, we are the first resource you should contact if your primary veterinarian is gone for the day. We can help you methodically decide the best course of action for you and your pet to get through the night peacefully and back to your own veterinarian tomorrow for a checkup, diagnoses and prescription if needed. If you require an emergency room, we will recommend that and make what we refer to as a “warm transfer”. This is a call from our on call veterinarian to the ER with a heads up to the ER doctors that you are on the way. We will forward your medical records electronically (if you are a subscriber) to the ER and a current medical summary (even if you are not a subscriber) of what is happening so that when you arrive, the emergency room staff is expecting you. This helps to remove much of the wait time and anxiety associated with this journey. And your experience will be much better. 

Tele-health is meant to be a compliment to traditional veterinary care. It is not, under any circumstance, meant to be a replacement. This is where it gets a little tricky. With the passing of these bills in Florida this month and California back in October of 2023, the path away from traditional veterinary medicine has gained some momentum and if you ask any local veterinarian, they will tell you it is not a good thing. But inertia can be powerful. The bills are being proposed, lobbied and passed by politicians, typically against the will of the veterinary community. And what is driving this is the desire for non-veterinary businesses like Walmart and Chewy wanting to be in the veterinary business, though neither of them are, putting your pets at risk. In the case of Chewy, they sell pet products, better than most, but they are not veterinarians. You wouldn’t go to the car dealer to have your bicycle repaired! Veterinarians at their core are well intentioned and empathetic and those working in the veterinary space have animal welfare front and center at all times, not profit. We support both privately owned clinics as well as corporate owned and in both scenarios, there are great veterinarians doing amazing work! And we will do whatever we can to continue to support the local veterinarian. That is the crux of our position. STAY LOCAL!

The proponents of these bills state that tele-health in this format provides increased access to care especially in rural areas where veterinary care is in short supply. While we may agree with this to a certain extent, Pets After Dark has numerous network providers (clinics) and subscribers in these areas and we always work in conjunction with local veterinarians. Our service encourages the pet owner to go back to their regular veterinarian the next day. We believe in this premise so much so that we actually guarantee and book that appointment for you, with your own veterinarian, the next day! And while there are instances that do not require a visit to the veterinarian, we can help you make that decision so your pet receives the best care needed.

The veterinarian’s point of view with this potential shift always yields the same concerns: delay in proper diagnoses, hence increased suffering for the pet and ultimately increased cost to the pet owner. In the Journal of American Pediatrics, a study found that telemedicine lead to improper or over-prescribing of antibiotics to kids. And the long term negative effects of this are well documented. It is only logical to believe that this condition will be the same with pets if we allow this new formulation to take hold. 

Back when we started the development of Pets After Dark, we did quite a bit of our own research. We spoke with veterinarians, pet owners, ER clinics, the AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association), the PVMA (Pennsylvania VMA), the WPVMA (Western Pennsylvania VMA), insurance companies, etc. You get the point. We spoke to everyone! We booked numerous appointments with online services to scope out the marketplace. We even paid to book a tele-health Zoom appointment on line with one of the big discount house pet tele-health providers. What happened next was insane! The Zoom call lasted no more than five minutes. The “doctor” that we were Zooming with never once showed her face, only a stock photo of a dog. After a few minutes, she prescribed a medication for a condition we were describing. This, by the way, is completely illegal. They got around part of the legalese issue by having a Pennsylvania veterinarian on the prescribing end. This deals with the “across state lines” issue. But it is still completely out of bounds as this veterinarian never physically examined our dog, that’s the lack of VCPR we discussed above. There are so many things wrong with this example, too many to detail here.  

So we share this today as one of the most consequential topics we have written about since we launched our weekly newsletter. At Pets After Dark, we are very pro-technology. We built our own system to accommodate all of our service requirements. This includes privately and securely housing sensitive medical records and personal info, clinic contacts, ability to execute calendar bookings around the city, video conferencing, to name a few. But at our core, providing the best veterinary care is our mission. And while we rely on technology to help us  serve the pet community to the best of our ability, human touch is not something that has a substitute. We are committed to doing our part to keep the human element in veterinary medicine to assure the best health for your pet.

Howard Swimmer, CEO and Co-Founder

Pets After Dark