Pet-parents will go all out for their pets - let them sleep in their beds, dress them in designer outfits, even feed them steak. As owners, we occasionally ask ourselves ‘is it too much’. The answer, as Tika the Iggy would no doubt agree with, is almost always no.
This mentality naturally extends to what people are willing to spend on their pets' health and wellbeing. Pet parents routinely pay for regular immunisations, check-ups and treatments, health food and even massages. As a result, the overall veterinary care market is worth over $87 billion, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8% in the next five years.
Whilst the value of veterinary care is in the vet services themselves, software is a critical gatekeeper to those services and is set to be a $2.5 billion market by 2032. Despite working in a booming sector, many vets still use outdated on-prem solutions - and some still rely on pen and paper notes. This setup creates operational challenges that come down to a lack of visibility within and across practices. If a chain of vets all work on different on-prem systems, pushing through pricing updates can be a manual headache prone to human error. Even in an individual practice, finding the data to prepare for a consultation and then filling everything in afterwards can take up to 30 minutes per 10 minute consultation.
It’s been a while since these systems have been considered out-dated and despite existing players in the market releasing cloud versions of their PMS in the early 2000s, up to 85% of the market is still on-prem. Perhaps because moving from one PMS to another is the business equivalent of open-heart surgery where one error can render the new system useless.
The natural evolution for the market has therefore been to deliver a host of effective point solutions that can work independently of the on-prem PMS to provide direct pain-relief for vets. Yet despite these solutions clearly being valuable, there are limitations to working with a sea of point solutions, namely they cannot speak to each other and achieving the next level of automation and efficiency is unobtainable.
In recent years we have seen new players emerge on the market looking to truly tackle the end-to-end opportunity moving beyond the PMS into an all-in-one operating system for vets and their customers. Whilst the benefit to the vet of a fully AI-enabled cloud solution is exciting, the ultimate prize for these players is to tap into the billions spent annually by doting pet owners. Offering the interface between vets and pet-parents could be the ideal way to capture pet parents’ hearts (and wallets).