Comment by sudosteph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudosteph | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they didn't try to pivot towards selling all that in-house software they built out to clinics directly. I'm sure some of it would have been useful. Also, presumably pet health records wouldn't have the same constraints of HIPAA, so it would be easier to scale and use a generic subscription SaaS model than if they had been making a human medical record company.

I can't speak to the quality of most available vet software today, but as a client, I would love to have my pets medical info in one place. Especially because I have relationships with both a local, general vet, and a specialist after my older cat got diagnosed with lymphoma. It was hard to even get those clinics on the same page at first since they were faxing ultrasounds around, and I'm still not sure if all records through. I have no way to verify. At best, I'll receive a PDF after a visit with some test results. But I don't have a comprehensive set of records online anyhwhere.

Maybe that space is already saturated or vet clinics don't have much incentive to pay for it. Still, I switched to a doctor with a better online records system (not based on the system alone though) and it definitely makes me happier with the service and less likely to switch again.

Vet practice management software (Saas) is a pretty competitive field already. If you think about it, if someone has built a platform for traditional MD / GP practices, it's fairly trivial to turn around and also offer it to vets. The bigger challenge is probably getting them to switch off their legacy paper systems.

Hardly anyone is paper anymore.

There's a lot of vet management software, but really only two that matter - Cornerstone and IDEXX.

All the vet schools use one or the other, and so do the vast majority of large vet clinics and corporations where young vets get their first jobs. If they ever start their own practice, they've already gotten use to Cornerstone/IDEXX, so there's no reason for them to switch.

There's little demand from clients to see their records online or transfer their records electronically. Sorry, HN crowd, but that's just the way it is with non-techies. The practices that do offer it use a number of third party integration services. However, the demand is so low, those companies hardly make any money because they can't charge very much.

Consolidation is also a big issue. Regional specialty hospitals are buying up local GPs. Companies like Banfield are also buying up specialty hospitals and GPs. This reduces the number of software buyers and obviates the need to "transfer files" because all the files are already within one system.

We originally believed all the reasons sudosteph points out as being a good reason to enter the vet tech space. It didn't quite work out for us.

Source: Previous startup helped vets/owners transfer records electronically.

Cornerstone and IDEXX? I think you're mixing something up. Cornerstone is a product, IDEXX is the vendor.

The software is almost secondary for IDEXX, though. They're primarily a national chain of veterinary labs -- bloodwork, tissue sample analysis, that sort of thing -- so they've got some pretty huge hooks into the industry.

Correct, the "big three" are Cornerstone, Avimark and Impromed. There are already several saas solutions as well, such as Neo and countless small vendors. It's telling that the top three are all now owned by either a lab services company (Idexx owns Cornerstone, DVMax and Neo) or a major supplier (Henry Schein owns both Avimark and Impromed). These products are probably no longer seen as strong businesses on their own but rather they provide a value to the parent company from integrations.

This article is spot on: http://avc.com/2014/07/the-dentist-office-software-story/

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