From Scribe to Self-Reading Practice: How AI Helps Independent Veterinary Practices Move Faster

Most veterinary practices have started their AI journey with the scribe, and for good reason. But what if the scribe is not the destination, but only the first step towards a practice that can read itself, surface what matters, and help owners make better decisions before the day even begins? Welcome back to the "Veterinary Business Podcast." I am your host, Dr. Amanda Landis-Hanna. To help us explore what comes after the AI scribe, we are joined today by my good friend, Robert Sanchez. Robert and I have known each other now for more than 10 years. We met through VetPartners, and I have always been a big fan of his work. Robert is the founder and CEO of Digital Empathy, where he is building AI infrastructure for independent veterinary practices. His belief is that independents will not only beat consolidators by simply getting bigger. They will also win by moving faster, paying attention sooner, and using their own practice data more intelligently. Today, we are discussing why the scribe is the right starting point, but not the whole strategy, what it means for a practice to read itself, how AI can turn everyday activity into better decisions, and why giving AI more of a practice's actual voice and signal may be the key to unlock independent hospitals and really allow them to develop more what they've been waiting for. This episode is sponsored by Ekwa Marketing, platinum sponsor of the Veterinary Business Institute, helping veterinary practices strengthen their visibility, attract the right clients, and build for long-term growth. Now, let's get into the conversation. Robert, welcome to the podcast.

Amanda, so great to be here. Thank you.

I am so grateful for your time, and I can't wait for our listeners to get some experience. Now, I know a lot more about your background, but can you share it with our listeners? How did you get started in your work? What inspired you to go down this pathway?

Yeah. Well, I've always known that what I wanted to do on this earth was to stop euthanasia of homeless dogs. It's been the same North Star I've had. That's part of what I think bonded us together when, I think when I met you, you were back at PetSmart Charities. And I was trying to figure out how to do that. Early on, I thought it was going to be through being an attorney, being an appellate litigator. And after my undergrad, ostensibly taking a gap year between that and law school, but really just turned out reading and exploring, I figured out, I think entrepreneurship was more my path. And I started working at a company that provided marketing services for veterinary practices. And I thought, "Well, hey, while I'm kind of growing up, this is a good way to get my bearings, to feed myself, to figure out what I want to do, and to help the people who I admire so deeply reach and help more pets." And Amanda, after I was doing that for about a year, I started getting that feeling that I think a lot of people get in their work, which is like there's some misalignment between the top and the bottom. And what I became really present to was this idea that we weren't focused on the right problem to solve for veterinary practices. Right. The companies were very excited to sell you a website. Mm-hmm. But that's kind of where the excitement ended. Right. The real challenge, and the reason why I started Digital Empathy after a couple of years there, was we have to figure out how this relationship works between veterinary practices and pet owners. And it's changed in the last, say, decade or so. It is much closer to a relationship that you share with a family member. Right. It is not suited for a commodity style service. The currency is trust. And so that's how I built Digital Empathy. That's why it's called Digital Empathy, is because I think this isn't so much about code. It's about understanding the bonds that people in veterinary practices need to share in order for this to be healthy. Right.

Yeah. The human-animal bond has such a huge impact. And how people relate to their animals, whether they're companion animals, or how they engage with their veterinary team has evolved even in the last 10 years.

Mm. Yeah, it sure has. I think we have, in so many ways, inherited a system that no longer serves us. We inherited this system that was kind of built on the principles of industrial medicine back from the 18th century. And there's a different way to be thinking about it. And that's always been the thing that consumed me. I mean, for better or worse, that's why I studied philosophy, is understanding the why behind the what. And that has led me to some pretty interesting places. And the one that I'm currently obsessed with is kind of the topic of today's conversation, which is what's the role of AI in veterinary medicine? And I want to talk a little bit about why I have the viewpoint that I do and what I think it means, if I'm right anyways. Mm-hmm. Because there's a lot of noise out there about AI. Right. It is closer probably to a buzzword, and even just a tool to get you to buy stuff than it is- Right... like a very principled and nuanced understanding of what this means and what it can be.

Right. And it's so diverse, right? Oh, yeah. Like my work with technology in a startup and how I use AI is very different from how you use AI to help independent practices.

Yeah. It is like the most incredibly powerful and adaptable tool that I can think of, and it is that. It's a tool, and so what matters is if you give me a piano, you're going to be living a pretty unenjoyable forced experience. If you give Beethoven a piano, you're going to be moved to tears. And so I've been following this trajectory for a little while. I saw, early on, it was clear as day that this was the next great movement within human culture, technologically anyways. And that's why I started the Veterinary AI Brief, along with my friends, Dr. Adam Little and Aaron Massacre. And so, the attention I've been playing has been pretty granular, but something really changed for me in December, and it changed for a lot of builders and executives around that time, too, because something very important happened. So before December, AI was interesting and valuable, I think mostly as a thought partner, really allowing you to kind of explore and plan and challenge and think, and clarify your own thinking. Now, what changed in December is there was a model release, actually two model releases, where for the first time, AI could actually build production-grade software. That's the unlock, right? Because the engineer has fundamentally been the bottleneck.

Mm-hmm.

It's like when we went from almost nobody being able to read, to people learning how to read. No longer would you have to go to the high priest to understand what the text said. You could learn it yourself, and there's this explosion of value that can happen after you really democratize some fundamentally new capability. And so I have been, for better or worse, I have an obsessive personality. I've spent the last, I guess five months now, living in Claude Code, and now actually Codex a bit, eight hours a day.

Wow.

Weekdays, weekends. It is my obsession. It is very difficult to understand what has opened up until you actually see it for yourself.

Right. Until you start building, and- Mm-hmm

... that's the thing that I hope to bring to the industry is just honest and insightful discourse about what is now possible, what questions should we be asking of vendors? What questions should we be asking of ourselves? Mm-hmm. This opens up radical change, absolutely radical change. And the perspective that I hope to bring most is more about what does this open up specifically within the relationship between the practice and the pet owner. That's where all my work is focused, and that's where I think some really exciting advances are possible.

Awesome. I want to come back to the bottleneck piece in a couple minutes. But the entry point for so many veterinarians like myself is the scribe, right? Mm-hmm. How can we save time? How can we streamline? I understand that you still think that that is the appropriate starting point, but you also think we've kind of gotten stuck. And this is based on a couple of conversations we've had. What are the benefits of the scribe? What have the scribes sort of opened up, and where are the limitations, right? Where do we need to take it from there?

That's a really good question. I think the scribe is some essential scaffolding for the business. But my goodness, it's more about what it makes legible to you that I think is so exciting. So, I doubt there are many practices out there who have started using a scribe and then stopped. There are some, I've spoken to some, but once you start using it, it's just so obviously radically transformative that-

Right, it's a great tool

... you can't go back. I think part of what blocks people sometimes on AI is it's a very natural thing. They see a technology, maybe a couple of years ago, they tried out ChatGPT, and it gave them some dumb answer that they saw was obviously wrong. Now, the thing to internalize is all right, that works. In principle, that skepticism that any medical doctor has-

Mm-hmm... it has served you well. Mm-hmm. The reason why this- You've been trained to do it.

Exactly, and it's really important. The reason this no longer works, though, is because of the compression of the time horizon of improvement for this technology. We are on-

Right, with large language modeling and how much data is coming in and being digested.

Oh, well, Amanda, we went from a couple of years ago, AI could barely do math, to now it's literally figuring out problems that humans have never been able to crack. Like that is the-

Isn't that crazy?

Oh my, it's so mind-blowing. That is the pace of change we're dealing with. So I'd say like best advice, lose your priors. See where the models currently are. There's still what is called the jagged edge to it, like there's some things you shouldn't be trustful of it without verification. But-

Always, always verify

Well, and the exciting thing to me, the way I see it is AI gets rid of a lot of the labor. It does not get rid of judgment. That's how we need to engineer these systems, is it does the drudgery and the labor. It presents these patterns to you, and then you're able to effectively judge. But that is a tangent we could spend a long time exploring. Your question is more about the scribe.

Well, and let's put a pin in it. Maybe we need to have a part two to really kind of go and- Sure... do a deep dive on that. Yeah. But I really want to kind of focus on the scribe, on the day-to-day for the practice.

Yeah. Well, I think what scribing does right now is it lets you see your kids, right? It lets you go home without working such crazy hours. It removes some of the drudgery. Who likes charting? And it doesn't remove everything. You still should be verifying, but oh my goodness, it's like going from a hand plow to a tractor. What an unlock that is. And the reason why I think this is just the start, and it's just so obvious to me, is what matters more, and this is especially for, I think at the beginning, it's leadership. What matters more is this idea of, geez, you now have observability into every conversation that happens in your practice. And I don't say that with a "1984" dystopian style perspective. I say it with this enthusiasm for an idea that what you can't measure, you can't improve.

Right.

And the conversations that happen in the practice, that's what's so important. That's the unlock. Now, all of a sudden-

That's the relationship.

Exactly. You can understand if you set your North Star principles for a practice, imagine waking up in the morning to a synthesized brief from, say, Claude Code or from Codex, the desktop app, saying, "Robert, these are the things you really care about. I'm going to show you how yesterday's conversations bubbled up to those, and where the space is between your true vision for the practice and where we're at now." And then you didn't have to read through all the transcripts. Nobody has time for that. What the power is, is legibility and pattern matching. It's this idea of, now I can know not just that people are saying no. Why are they saying no, right? Mm-hmm. What's the why behind these symptoms that I'm only kind of loosely observing? Now I can really dig in and have a partner who makes all of this legible and understandable, and I can truly get a grip on

how is my business actually showing up in every possible way that I could conceivably want to measure it. Right. The conversations now become data. They become- Yeah... measurable. They become objective. And going back to your earlier point about the bottlenecks, it's not the data piece, it's the attention. Mm-hmm. It's the focus. So when you talk about that, about the bottleneck piece, and also about making the data, these conversations, how do you talk about those pieces? How do you have conversations about that? And then how do you fix the problems? Mm-hmm.

I think what's really important to understand is you don't have to be perfect, and this shouldn't be seen as something scary because you're going to see just how imperfect you are. It's like the first step to actually understanding what's going on and making real progress, just day to day in a way that's manageable. And it's honestly, it's not just the scribe. It's this idea of blind spots that you have. That's what's exciting. We all, every business owner has blind spots, and usually they are discovered embarrassingly too late because something like a disease progresses to the point where it becomes obvious, and you're like, "Oh my goodness, I need to figure out the source of this." And so, I have this different perspective of what if AI could just be helpful? Not like an untrustworthy open Claude that's going off and getting into a bunch of trouble. But imagine if... Let me give you an example. I think when I talk to practitioners, and we work with hundreds of practices, and I have spent so many of the last decade plus talking to practice owners and leadership, and I hear a lot of guilt. Honestly, I hear a lot of guilt and shame, like people feeling like they're never enough, and that sucks. I hate that. And I think part of it, Amanda, is because we feel like we're inspired to get into this field, and sometimes we're not living up to who we wanted to be and the kind of difference that-

Right. Our own self-expectations and sort of that imposter syndrome as opposed to what everybody else sees, right?

Yeah.

Everyone else is more compassionate than we are towards ourselves.

I know. And I think the thing to think about is it's not your fault. You inherited a system that was built for industrialized medicine. Literally, that's where this all gets traced back to. Every single primitive that we have to build with, it came from the 18th century of how a medical facility was built to serve people past just the doctor that would make house call visits to you, right? Like it's, "Okay, people are coming into the office now. How do we establish..." And that piece has not fundamentally changed all that much over the last 300 years. And that's why I find this so exciting, because this is the thing that changes that. So I think I'll say sometimes the guilt is from something that... It's always from feeling like you let somebody down, right? And one of the ways that happens is we lose sight of our patients, and it's because we just don't have any way of maintaining a memory of anything beyond, say, like a couple dozen relationships at one given time. You can't manage hundreds or thousands. No person could do that. We can't remember it. Now you can. So imagine seeing AI more as your peripheral vision than anything. Imagine waking up to that morning report and it says, "Lucky, the golden retriever, who you diagnosed with a heart murmur a few months ago, hasn't been back. They haven't followed through on the echo. This is my proposed email to kick off to them. What do you think?" Like instead of asking you to know all your unknown unknowns, this can surface them to you, and it can be like the engine of activity that you can oversee and exercise judgment on and unlock all this work. So what gets me really excited is you... And there's just a lot of thinking around this in Silicon Valley right now for startups, for forward-thinking organizations. There was an executive, the guy who started Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who, he wrote an essay that I think is so forward-thinking, and it's about seeing your company as almost like a product in and of itself and being able to observe all the ways it shows up is this fundamental unlock now because we have AI which makes that understandable and useful. And so I think you think about, "Okay, what does the scribe open up? What does the PIMS open up? What does your email open up?" You don't have to look at all these surfaces themselves. Your AI can do that, and you can say, "This is what I care about. Bring this to me every single morning so that we can kick off work together." I think that's the frontier. I think that's incredibly exciting. Yeah. It's a big part of what we're working on at Digital Empathy, because I just think this is such an unlock, and I don't hear a lot of people talking about it, which is nuts to me.

Absolutely. I think that there's this opportunity for growth and development on both the human level as well as on sort of this AI tool level as well. Now, when we're talking about how to grow with this AI, and with the objective data of these conversations, right, of this human-animal bond and this patient relationship, how do we best use that? In the morning when I'm sitting down with my hot tea, and for my crazy partners who like coffee, bleh. If you put enough creamer in it, I'll drink it. But otherwise... It's just a method to get creamer in my face. True. Can you walk us through what this kind of concept of a practice that's reading itself looks like first thing in the morning to save time, to streamline, to remind us of those conversations?

Yeah. So, I think where there's probably the most space between us, Amanda, is the shameful disdain you have for coffee. I have a really wonderful Breville machine where I make a double shot of espresso multiple times during the day.

Right. But how much creamer can you put in that for me, right?

Oh, zero, and how dare you.

Oh. Like this is... We used to be friends, Robert. You're breaking my heart.

This is like throwing paint at the Mona Lisa to me.

Ugh. Okay, we will agree to disagree, but we can certainly agree on helping practices.

Yes. And I think your point is like, "All right, what's the next step? How do you actually do this?" Right? So like, yeah, it seems interesting and important. What do I do today or tomorrow to actually start trying? I think there are a couple of ways. Depending on when this comes out, I'm hopeful that we have something really helpful. But that shouldn't stop you. Honestly, there's stuff that you can do right now off the shelf. You don't need to buy something from a vendor right now other than like OpenAI or Anthropic because they have tools that I think every business needs to be using right now. And honestly, like here's the thing. I think, and I'm speaking right now to the CEOs of veterinary practices, not just like groups, but like you own a vet practice. You're a CEO. You've got to get this. You can't delegate this. You can't delegate learning AI to someone else in your practice. You need a real felt sense of what's possible here-

Right... so that you can know what good looks like. Yeah.

Otherwise, you're building on quicksand. And so I think the first step is you have to use this obsessive personality that you undoubtedly have because there's no other way you'd be crazy enough to start a veterinary practice or run one.

Right. Entrepreneurs are, by our very nature, forward thinkers and slightly crazy.

Yeah, yeah, I know. This is a wild decision-making that you and I do what we do. Okay, so you have to live in the tools yourself in order to really capably steward this for your practice. But what you can do is start using either Codex, which is OpenAI's professional desktop tool for knowledge work, or Claude, or Claude, I guess, the desktop app is called for Anthropic. We use Claude. However, I have more OpenAI subscription-- I don't even want to tell you how much I spend on AI subscriptions right now. It's a lot.

We all have our addictions, Robert.

Yeah. I really think it's worth it, because I build a lot, and I build a lot in parallel. But what you can do is once you give yourself two weeks to really test drive this tool, then you start connecting all of your context to it. So you go out, you buy the $200 a month subscription to either one of these, and then you start hooking up your context. I have a bone to pick with the PIMS companies and any scribe who doesn't do this. If you try to wall off your data, you are hurting innovation, and you are making it hard for our industry to recognize progress. But honestly, that's okay because they can't do it for that much longer. One thing that Codex and Claude can do is they could use the computer. If you have a PIMS company that won't let you read and write data, honestly, you could have an automation set up from one of these tools to go take a look on your laptop, on your computer, have it say, "Look at all the conversations or the appointments that happened, the SOAP notes that were written for the previous day, and build me this report." So step one, anything that is a context silo for your practice, fold it in. There are connectors built into it. And just literally ask Claude itself, it's probably my best advice, have it interview you, have it say, "This is who I am, this is what I care about. What I really need you to do is interview me so that you can figure out how you could be most helpful to me in a way that connects back to what matters." And then start figuring out how to bring in all your context. If AI doesn't have context on a situation, it is fundamentally limited and generic. It's going to give you slop. When it has context, when it understands your work as best as it possibly can, then it can be really useful to you, and you can steer it, and you can use it to do the grunt work, and you go up a layer of abstraction and leverage, which is always the exciting thing that technology allows us to do as a species. And so you get all your context in, and then you start having a morning briefing every single day. You can have it email this to you. You can have it run it through NotebookLM, which is Google's text to podcast tool. Imagine setting up a routine which you can automate all of this very easily. This is no longer a scary, "I don't even know how to do this." I never even figured out how to get VCRs to work. I'm now building what I think are going to be very large and important and valuable systems because I have that partner who can meet me who I am and who can translate, "Here's what I want," and being very clear about that, into something that actually works. And so you start just building out your morning briefing. It's not going to end there, but this is where to start, right?

Right.

And you can digest it any way you want. It could be a text message. I just have it show up right in Claude as a very nice... It knows 8:00 a.m. every morning I go from dad duty to CEO duty, and this is what I want to know every single day. There's literally something called routines. There are artifacts. There are ways to make this beautiful. Mobile first, do it right from your phone. Audio first, if you want to listen to a podcast on, "Okay, here are all the things I want to know about my cases for today." So I can do my actual rounds style prep work on the drive to the hospital.

Right.

I can do it then. So it's thinking about, what is it I want to start every day by knowing in a literal perfect world? And then you can work with Claude or Codex to actually do that. And my challenge to you would be think big. Don't just do the boring stuff. It is hard to feel what has really been unlocked until you start actually using these tools, connecting it to context, and seeing what you're now able to do.

One of the things that I really appreciate about this idea is that it reframes what practice owners really need. It's not always more data, it's more dashboards or more things to check. Sometimes it's just having those correct signals, those correct messages brought into focus. And I think that applies beyond operations as well. For a lot of independent veterinary practices, their online presence is sending signals every day through Google, the visibility pieces, the SEO, the reviews, the local searches, the website performance, as well as how easily pet owners can understand who the practice is and why they should be selected. That's why Veterinary Business Institute, in partnership with Ekwa Marketing, our platinum sponsor, offers a complimentary marketing strategy meeting for veterinary practices. It's a $900 valued session, and it's designed to help practice owners step back and look at how their hospital is showing up online, where they may be missing opportunities, and what practical steps could make them more visible and competitive in the market. And that's so valuable when we're talking about how do we streamline the process. It really connects... so well to today's conversation because whether we're talking about AI, operations, or marketing, the goal is really the same: helping independent practices see what matters sooner so they can move faster and make better decisions. For anyone who is interested in that $900 session to help with the marketing pieces, you can book the session at www.veterinarybusinessinstitute.com/msm. And it kind of leads into this thing that you're calling this feedback flywheels. How can we make life easier for veterinarians, for veterinary teams, for hospital managers, so that we're utilizing this data that we're getting in order to streamline the process and sort of reinforce these relationships? Do you feel like the things that vets are currently doing can help make the AI that they're using even smarter? But where are those kind of drawbacks? Where are vets falling short, and what are the opportunities to continuously improve?

So, this reminds me of a conversation I had with a really smart colleague just the other day. And, the term that we kept coming back to is loops and flywheels. Mm-hmm. I think ultimately what really matters is context. What veterinarians always want is context. That's what unlocks your value as a diagnostician, right? It's when you don't see the full picture that you operate at a level that is fundamentally blocking your true value, the judgment apparatus that you've built over so many years. It's those blind spots. And so I think all these systems that you've built out, and you mentioned dashboards. Nobody wants another dashboard. Nobody wants to use another tool. Actually, I think that's why this is so compelling. We have all these tools we use. I no longer look at them anymore. I just look at my desktop apps, either Claude or Codex. And all of these efforts that you've had now turn into streams of context that AI can make legible and useful for you in a way that is digestible and actionable. And so I think what I would be doing is, yeah, so you're working on websites and SEO. That's part of your context. That's also important. You don't want to read the GA4 report that your marketing company sends you every month because it's not useful to you. It's not meeting you where you are.

Right.

It's not the level of abstraction that you need as a business owner to understand, am I doing well? That's what you need, really. And so figuring out these are kind of where all my context silos are. These are the critical operations of the company that I've been working on. But now piping all of those, really spending time sitting down thinking about where all my data live? And then figuring out, ask Claude, ask Codex, "How do I do this? How do I connect this to you so that we can have this one tool that I live in every day that I can connect to with my smartphone, that I can listen to and talk to and have strategic brainstorming discussions with that now is able to meet me where I am?" I think that's where you turn so much of this kind of feeling like unbounded, fractured inertia into one legible system that compounds, that improves, that I'm able to understand and really unlocks my value as a really smart person with good judgment, who has a vision for where this practice needs to go.

Okay, so for our listeners, I want to drop a couple of hints about what may be coming. So past the scribe and past this morning briefing, which I completely agree with you. I think that that's a really great way to sort of step into our power as veterinary team members. I want to hear about Spotlight and kind of what you've told me it's going to be doing sort of expanding this context frontier. We've used that term. I've heard you use that term, but our listeners haven't heard that term. And even I still kind of struggle to get my brain wrapped around it. Yeah. So what does expanding the context frontier really mean? How do we use AI to sound like us? Again, always check everything. Always go in with the skepticism that veterinary team members are so well adept to. But I want AI to sound like me, to feel like me, to help me continue and develop those relationships, and how does that help unlock new ways for independent hospitals to set themselves apart?

Yeah, of course. So, I think there are two questions there, and I think they both deserve not just a superficial answer. Yeah. So, the first one is like how do I get AI to sound like me? Because I think the premise under that is there's all this work I'd ideally love to do. I don't have the time to do it. Right? So I would love to be following up with clients more and about the patients that I'm seeing. Who has time to write 200 emails a day? And so I think the first step, again, if the question is what is the context that AI needs in order to do useful work for me and not just feel like slop, which, God, if you're on LinkedIn, you see it every day, right? It's like the fingerprints of AI are so visible on so many posts. And it's because-

Obviously not on mine. You know that. Like that's inhuman to all of my LinkedIn posts.

And well, I do want to use a disclaimer. I use AI for all my LinkedIn posts, too, but not as a blunt instrument that just is totally generic. Right. I've taught AI how I speak. I hooked up Gmail so that it trained itself on my writing style. Really? That's so crazy. Yeah. It's like the number one thing, if you want to, well, verify what AI is sending and have it do- Yeah... a good job at the first pass, you need to give it the context of how you actually write and communicate, and-

So can it learn my sassiness? That's what I need to know.

I don't think anyone can learn your sassiness. Like there's only so much the frontier of these models can do. Maybe someday.

Of course. And I'm on the leading edge of the sass, so I understand. Eventually we'll get there.

Maybe once we get to the singularity, but even then. So I think the first step is give it that context, your writing, right, everywhere where your writing shows up, how you have conversations. That's why scribing data is so useful, because it can really understand you, and it can honestly get surprisingly introspective and insightful about spotting the deeper patterns and connections, but the stuff that you probably do really, really well, and it also feels nice to have that demonstrated so clearly, and then reflect it so clearly. And then so I think that's where you have to start. Otherwise, you're just going to get the stuff that sounds like everyone else. You asked about Spotlight and how this connects to context. It's like it is basically this idea that context is what unlocks your value as a veterinary practice. When you're limited in how you can help a pet, and you can probably sense that, but it just feels murky, like maybe you don't know why somebody's saying no, you don't know why they haven't come back, whatever. My bet, the bet that I've made is it's because you didn't have the full picture delivered to you, like something was missing. And I think we need to get outside this idea that industrialized medicine structure is still serving us. It's not. Basically, what it gives you, one real way that this is showing up is it gives you five minutes through an assistant or a technician to capture the story of what's going on with that pet and that person. That doesn't work, right? What works is when you know a client for an extremely long period of time. You've built up this context. You know what they worry about. You know what they'll say yes to. You'll know what you'll have to spend a little extra time kind of walking them through and explaining. You know what their blind spots are. It feels more like this personal style of medicine. We don't have a way to do that with the current industrial medicine system, and so that's why we built Spotlight. Spotlight shifts from this idea of like, "Oh my goodness, we've set up our teams to fail. Five minutes, capture the full story." You can't do that. Nobody can do that. And the history itself isn't even enough. What we need is real discovery. We don't just need to know what the symptoms of the pet are, and to verify that we actually have a complete picture. We need to know how to care for the person. What are they worried about, right? This is a service that we're providing. If we want to actually provide the service that they need, we need to know what that means, right? We need-

Yeah. The human-animal bond. Our patients don't walk into the hospitals on their own. There is always somebody on the other end of the leash, and how we serve that person such that they feel as good as our patients do when we send them out of the door.

That's exactly it. And that should be the bar. And honestly, that is what is predictive of your ability to just have fun doing what you do. It's when you build these relationships, and that's always our North Star. It's coming back to how do we really serve the bond between the practice and the person. And so that's why we're so excited about Spotlight. That's why it's such a huge bet that we've made because we think that context is your unlock. We think that if you know the deeper story, not just that, "Hey, this is a wellness exam," but Fluffy has been abstaining from eating for three days, or the better part of three days. She has been drinking more than usual. That changes the starting point that you have.

Right. That's gone from a wellness to a sick visit, and how do you make that transition really easily?

Exactly. And if you know... So many people get worried talking about money, and I get it. Like honestly, I'm not great talking about money when we sign up clients, because I have a naturally agreeable personality, and you don't like hearing no. But I don't want you to know that somebody's worried about money after your team works up a treatment plan. Mm-hmm. Somebody's got $300 in their pocket, it is so much better to know that before the visit starts than after you present them that and you get the, "I'll think about it," right? Yeah. And so-

The spectrum of care options that are really being discussed in the industry as a whole are so invaluable. It's something that veterinarians have always done. We've always flexed our capabilities around where our clients are, but how do we do an even better job meeting our clients where they are, and having that conversation in a way that doesn't feel pressured?

That's it. Yeah, exactly. And so this is the connective tissue to our conversation, is because ultimately what AI does is it allows you to personalize experiences at scale. Imagine instead of getting the frenetic briefing from your tech or your assistant, or reading some one-line appointment note, imagine every time you walk into a room, you open up your appointment notes right before, and you get this dossier on what's showing up and what they actually need in their own words, but in a way that is legible to you and useful. Bullet format, the way you were trained to process information. Mm-hmm. Takes 30 seconds max to read, already lives in the surface that you're using. And now imagine that all of that data that you're getting, the rich discoveries that are happening before the visits, that now has a meta-layer to it because now your Claude or your Codex can see that information. It can marry that with the conversation that's happening in the room. Your PIMS data, your SOAP notes, all of that now becomes abstracted at an even higher level, and you can just start seeing things that would've been so unthinkable to the previous, your parents' generation. And it's so invigorating to me because it, I think what it does is it serves the bonds. It can allow us to provide these deeply personal types of experiences at scale. If you're an independent practice, that's how you win. You're not going to beat corporate on marketing budgets. You're going to win by having experiences that outpace, outstrip, and outrun everything else on the market. And I think by being really attuned to how context changes the game, and how to pipe in context to this new surface, literally, it's not hard to do this. It just takes knowing a little bit of digging in, knowing how to use the tools, and I think incredible transformations can be found from that.

This conversation has been, as always in conversations with you- Mm-hmm... really eye-opening. If someone wants to continue this conversation with you, as well as see pictures of your adorable children, where can they get more information? Do you want them to go to your LinkedIn, or do you want to send them to your website?

Honestly, yeah. Drop me a DM on LinkedIn. I am always there stirring up controversy and making trouble. You could certainly go to our website too. Depending on when this launches, just you can go spotlightvet.com, but that redirects to Digital Empathy, so it's going to be, by the time this launches, digitalempathy.ai. And at the time of recording, it's digitalempathyvet.com.

Awesome.

And that's a redirect, though, if you go there. I think we're recording a little bit in advance of this, so I think by the time probably you see this, we're going to have some pretty radically new capabilities that we're offering, so check it out. We built it for you, and we're really excited about what you can do when the tools serve and adapt to you instead of the other way around.

Awesome. Fascinating as always. If your veterinary practice, or listeners' veterinary practices, have already started using AI for scribing, for medical notes, this conversation is just that reminder that the real opportunities are coming. They're bigger than just the documentation. The scribe can certainly reduce friction, but the next layer is about helping the practice understand itself, utilizing that data, really personalizing the conversation. What needs the attention? What patterns are emerging? What comes out of each individual doctor's conversations? Where opportunities are currently being missed, and how practice owners can really tailor that messaging to know even before the day takes over, with these morning meetings. One of the strongest ideas from today's episode is that the bottleneck for independent practices is not always the data, but it's the attention, it's the focus. Practice owners are surrounded by signals every day, and the AI conversation can be very overwhelming. But without a system that can surface what matters, those signals can easily get buried under appointments, callbacks, staffing issues, client communication, and the constant pace of hospital life. And it's really ironic, right? We can use AI to improve those things, but in order to use AI to improve those things, we have to make the time to really master it. And mastering AI in the practice isn't just about adopting another tool. It's about creating a faster, smarter operating system for decision making. And for the independent practices, speed may be one of the greatest competitive advantages they have in order to really enhance this veterinary-client bond and this human-animal bond. For our listeners, if Robert's approach to AI infrastructure resonates with you, certainly connect with him at the website, like he mentioned, at Digital Empathy, or reach out to him on LinkedIn under his name, Robert Sanchez, where he's helping independent veterinary practices move beyond the basic AI tools and towards systems that helps give entrepreneurs, hospital owners, veterinarians, veterinary team members, clear insight, stronger context, and faster action. So as we wrap our time today, Robert, thank you so much for your time and your willingness to share your information. And for all of our listeners, thank you for listening to the "Veterinary Business Podcast." Please spread the word if this was inspiring to you. We cannot do this podcast without our listeners. And we will speak with all of you next time