Since gaining unprecedented attention due to the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has rapidly evolved from a fairly niche branch of healthcare into one of the industry’s prevailing cornerstones. Today, a wider range of healthcare institutions are implementing virtual care for patients, bolstering a more accessible, equitable experience and potentially quickening the pace of necessary intervention.

However, for many sectors and divisions, telehealth infrastructure comprises benefits and obstacles in equal measure. One such field is veterinary medicine, where remote care’s most impactful offerings have also unveiled key areas of improvement. Addressing the latter will remain crucial in creating a more valuable, well-rounded health journey for pets and their owners.

Embracing Present Benefits

Veterinary telehealth entails various services that have risen to the industry’s forefront since gaining urgency during the pandemic; these include, but are not limited to, consultation, triage, vital sign monitoring, e-prescribing, and advice concerning future care. Since the end of the federal COVID public health emergency, these services have left an indelible mark on the veterinary field, suggesting a more streamlined, flexible, and affordable future.

According to Anipanion Chief Veterinary Officer Dr. Jessica Trimble, this notion boils down to a crucial four-fold benefit.

“[Telehealth] is better for the pets in many cases because virtual consultation can be beneficial at some point in that pet’s health journey,” Dr. Trimble said. “It’s better for the pet owners, too, because they have that communication line to a more accessible source. It also benefits the actual veterinary teams — especially people who may need to work from home — while our vet techs can have more flexible workplaces. For the businesses as a whole, we can create new revenue streams, offer new services, and build better connected care experiences. It’s different now than it was before or during the pandemic; clinics are no longer just doing this because they have to.”

Dr. Trimble also notes a persistent shift from in-person appointments to telehealth for preliminary, base-level healthcare discussions (generalized health advice, patient education, etc.). This change stands to alleviate face-to-face patient backlogs and better allocate institutional focus on elevated or in-progress care situations.

“We’re starting to see less of those generalized healthcare questions in person and seeing more of a switch to chats, texts, and other forms of electronic communication,” Dr. Trimble said. “It makes sense because people want to have that connection with their clinic.”

Refining for the Future

Recent forecasts project the veterinary telehealth market to grow at a ​​compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17 percent from 2023 to 2030. To fully realize this potential and capitalize on the aforementioned benefits, the field must find solutions for an equally diverse set of challenges — namely, technological fragmentation amidst personnel shortages and enduring telehealth hesitancy.

With many clinics still overwhelmed in the wake of the pandemic, the need for technological efficiency remains paramount for a sound, accessible digital health ecosystem; this has been difficult to achieve, as many parts of the community remain cautious about creating new, predominantly telehealth-based vet-client-patient relationships (VCPRs).

“The VCPR is a huge point of contention [within veterinary telehealth],” Dr. Trimble said. “Some are for it, others are against it, and some are in the middle; it’s a state-by-state decision, which makes it very confusing for veterinarians and clients. So we need a better understanding of the VCPR as a whole and how that’s changing.”

Perhaps the biggest driver of this challenge is an inconsistent means of remote health data collection and management. Currently, such resources are nebulous and often unaffordable for strictly remote patients — a problem that has been fundamental in sowing telehealth uncertainty.

“One reason many veterinarians are fearful of establishing VCPRs online is that they don’t have good medical data,” Dr. Trimble said. “If I’m asking you for your dog’s heart rate, the chances of you getting accurate heart data are probably not great. So one major area of improvement we have is making more accurate, cheaper wearables for pets — then we will be able to have more accurate medical data, and veterinarians will be much more comfortable making decisions electronically.”

These issues underscore the need for both uniform telehealth legislation and leaner, more vertically integrated technology that reinforces VCPRs while providing ample infrastructure for efficient patient data management. Such balance would set a better stage for institutional balance, which could facilitate staff retention, care quality, and ultimately clearer proof of integrated telehealth’s long-term viability and inherent value.

In turn, more practices could create long overdue paths to fast, convenient, and multidimensional practitioner insight — and for some, this could make a critical difference.

“The majority of the time, people just want to have a quick conversation to float an idea,” Dr. Trimble said. “They’re not looking for some complex diagnosis; they just want to connect with a human who they can trust. Getting to do that has really taught me the benefits of telehealth. We did about 275,000 consultations in four years, and I remember several conversations where we all looked at each other afterward and said, ‘We’ve never met that dog in our lives, and we just saved its life.’”