I'll admit this is probably a controversial take, but I think a lot of veterinarians don't know their patients' histories well enough before walking into an exam. And before anyone takes offense, I want to be clear that I include myself in that statement. This is not a problem of intent. Every veterinarian I know genuinely wants to do right by their patients, and given enough time I have no doubt that we would all be intimately familiar with every patient that walks through our doors. The reality is that it's a problem of time. When you're moving from appointment to appointment it can be genuinely difficult to carve out the time to read through every past note. But knowing a patient's full medical history before starting an exam or speaking with a client has significant value, and I want to make the case for it from a few different aspects.
One: Client trust. We are in a period where client trust of veterinarians is at a low point, and part of that has to do with how the experience of a veterinary visit has changed. Many of us practice in multi-doctor hospitals now, and even smaller practices work more often with emergency, urgent care, and specialist vets as part of the health care team. The days of every client seeing the same vet every single visit are largely behind us. That shift isn't going away, but it does mean that the natural familiarity that used to come from years of seeing the same patients has to be replaced with something deliberate, and that something is knowing the history before you walk in the room. When a client brings their dog in for the third time this year and the doctor they see doesn't know all the details of the previous visits, they notice. They may not say anything, but they notice. On the other side of that, when you walk in and ask how that ear infection resolved, or whether the diet change you recommended last fall made a difference, the effect on the client is immediate. It tells them that someone is paying attention, that their pet is not just another appointment on a full schedule. That kind of trust is not just a soft value either. Clients who feel known are more likely to follow through on your recommendations, less likely to seek a second opinion elsewhere, and far more likely to refer friends and family to your practice. Reading the history thoroughly before every exam is one of the simplest and most effective things we can do to build that relationship, and it costs nothing but time. And yes, keep reading, because I know that's the part that's easier said than done.
Two: Avoiding preventable mistakes. We put a great deal of emphasis in veterinary medicine on thorough documentation. Medications, problem lists, allergic reactions, client preferences; we stress the importance of recording all of it, and for good reason. But if that information isn't being read before an exam, it may as well never have been recorded. A documented allergy buried in a SOAP note from two years ago offers no protection to the patient if no one reviews it before prescribing. This is a significant part of what leads to preventable medical mistakes, and they run the full spectrum in terms of consequence. On the less severe end there are errors that only have financial impacts, like giving a vaccine that wasn't due yet or repeating bloodwork that was done just a few weeks prior. On the more serious end there are mistakes that carry real medical risk, like prescribing a drug that interacts negatively with a current medication or recommending a food or treatment that the patient has a documented allergy to. Beyond the immediate harm to the patient, these kinds of errors can do lasting damage to the trust a client has in the doctor and in the hospital as a whole. And depending on the severity of the outcome, the consequences can extend well beyond a lost client. Complaints, negative reviews, and in serious cases legal exposure are all possibilities. What makes these situations particularly difficult is that they tend to be viewed in the harshest light, because the information was there in the record and the expectation is that it should have been known. That is a hard position to defend, and it is one that is almost entirely avoidable.
Three: Understanding chronic and complex conditions. Many of the chronic diseases we manage in small animal medicine are not straightforward to diagnose or treat, and finding patterns across a patient's history is often one of the most important diagnostic tools we have. A single exam or a single set of notes rarely tells the full story, but the full medical record is something different. It is longitudinal data, and that is something no individual test or visit can replicate. Trends in body weight, changes in bloodwork values over months or years, the frequency and character of recurring clinical signs, these are things that only become visible when you look at the whole picture. When you step back and examine the full arc of a patient's problems, diagnostics, treatments, and responses over time, patterns emerge that can point clearly toward a diagnosis of chronic allergies, endocrine disease, immune-mediated conditions, and others that might otherwise be missed or delayed for a long time. The treatment response piece of that history is also particularly valuable. Knowing that a patient had better pain control with one NSAID over another, or that a particular antibiotic has failed repeatedly, is information that can meaningfully change your treatment approach today. Knowing what worked and what didn't over the course of the treatment history can sometimes offer new insights that even more diagnostics may not be able to tell you, and that can be another part of the overall picture that is only visible when looking at the record as a whole rather than a single piece of it.
Across all three of these aspects, the common thread is the same: the more you know going in, the better the outcome for the patient, the client, and the practice. The harder question is how we actually make that happen when time is already the scarcest resource in the building. The real challenge is that taking 10 to 15 minutes to carefully work through every SOAP note and lab report for each patient is simply not realistic in a busy practice. Even a more conservative five minutes per patient adds up to well over an hour and a half across a typical day of appointments, and that is time most of us simply don't have to spare.
The practical solution is not to work longer hours or treat fewer patients. It's to find a way to organize the medical record so that the most relevant information is accessible in 1 to 2 minutes rather than 10 to 15. Some practices with the staffing resources assign team members to build out patient summaries before appointments, which works well but is labor-intensive and not feasible for most. The other option is software that can organize and present that information automatically, saving time without sacrificing the depth of knowledge that makes a real difference in the exam room. Many AI scribe software suites have some basic record summary tools that are honestly worth checking out if you already have them. Scryvet is built specifically for this, making medical histories easy to navigate and ensuring that the important information is right there when you need it.
I'll be honest, I'm not suggesting I have all of this figured out. But over the past nine months of building and testing Scryvet, I can speak from experience that when I take a minute or two to skim through the problem list it generates, the medical and behavioral alerts, and the medications and diagnostics summary, I walk into the room feeling more confident and prepared. And I think my clients notice the difference. There is something that comes through when you know a patient's history, even if you've never seen them before, and clients pick up on it. The medical record is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to help our patients, and I think it is too often underutilized simply because accessing it fully takes more time than we have. I'm hoping that Scryvet can help change that for more vets going forward. If you'd like to learn more, you can visit scryvet.com.