The Veterinary CEO

Category: Run the Operation

  • How I Use AI to Help Run Two Veterinary Hospitals

    I own two hospitals, one in Houston and one in Cincinnati, and I can’t be in both places at once. The admin work behind them (reports, policies, purchase decisions, staff documents) doesn’t stop just because I’m on a plane. AI hasn’t replaced my managers or my accountants, but it has become a business assistant that works whenever I do. Here’s what I use it for, where I draw the line, and how you can start this week.

    You wouldn’t be early. A new Digitail and AAHA survey of 1,730 veterinary professionals found that 83.7% now use AI, up from 39.2% in 2024. But nearly half of practices have no AI strategy or anyone in charge of it. Most people are using it. Few are using it on purpose.

    1. Turning exports into numbers I can act on

    Every practice-management system can export data. Few owners do anything with it, because the reports are clunky and the spreadsheets take hours. This is where AI has helped me most.

    I export production and financial data from our practice software and have AI help me build dashboards from it: production by doctor and by service, monthly trends, and the KPIs I check every month across both hospitals. I tell it what question I’m trying to answer, it helps me structure the spreadsheet and formulas, and I check the totals against the source report before I trust anything.

    2. Pressure-testing equipment purchases

    Equipment reps are good at making a purchase feel obvious. AI is useful because it has no commission.

    When I looked at a point-of-care ultrasound, I used AI to lay out the decision instead of the sales pitch. A few lessons came out of that process:

    • Separate the use cases. Tech-performed POCUS and radiologist-performed ultrasound are different services with different revenue and different staffing. Lumping them together makes the ROI look better than it is.
    • Track demand before you buy. Count how often you’d have used it over a set period. Real cases beat a rep’s estimate.
    • Require training before purchase, not after. If nobody is trained on day one, the machine sits in a closet.
    • Decide who owns it. I want technicians, not doctors, owning handheld diagnostic tools. It puts the tool with the people who will use it most and protects doctor time.
    • Build the payoff plan before you sign. If it’s financed, know how many uses a month it takes to cover the payment.

    3. Writing the documents nobody has time to write

    Every practice needs HR documents, clinical standards and protocols. Most of us have outdated versions or none. AI gets me from a blank page to a solid first draft in minutes, and then my team and I make it ours.

    I’ve used it for staff HR documents, written clinical standards, and the framework for a doctor case-review program. It also helped me organize compensation benchmarking before we hired credentialed technicians, so I knew what a competitive offer looked like before I made one.

    My advice: have anything touching employment law reviewed by a qualified professional before it goes live. AI drafts. People decide.

    4. Delegating while I’m on the road

    I travel, and two hospitals don’t run on my schedule. AI helps me turn a scattered list of thoughts into clear instructions for my accounting team, so they know what I need, by when, and why. Clear asks mean fewer follow-up emails and fewer mistakes.

    It also helps with the odd jobs every owner gets: rewriting website copy so our claims are accurate, or setting up simple Google Ads campaigns after we brought ads in-house. None of these are hard. They’re just time I don’t have.

    The guardrails that matter

    AI is confident even when it’s wrong. In that same Digitail/AAHA survey, the top concerns were reliability and accuracy (67.4%) and data security and privacy (59%). Both are fair. At an AVMA business forum panel last year, one speaker put the standard well: “It has to be an educated, confident human in the loop.”

    Here’s what I’d put in place at any practice:

    1. Check every number against the source. If a dashboard total doesn’t match the export, the dashboard is wrong until proven otherwise.
    2. Keep sensitive data out. Strip client names, staff names, account numbers and anything else you wouldn’t post on a bulletin board. Read your tool’s data settings before you paste anything in.
    3. AI drafts, people decide. Hiring, firing, pricing, purchases and medicine stay with humans. AI helps me think. It doesn’t sign anything.
    4. Know when to call a professional. Contracts, employment issues and taxes still go to the right advisor. AI just helps me walk in with better questions.
    5. Name an owner. Nearly half of practices in the survey have no AI strategy or designated owner. Somebody should be accountable for which tools you use and how.

    A prompt you can use today

    A common mistake is treating AI like a search box. Give it context, a clear job and a format, and the output gets much better. Here’s the template I’d start with. Fill in the brackets.

    You are a business advisor to an independent veterinary practice owner.

Context: I own [number] small-animal hospital(s) with [number] DVMs.
My goal: [the decision or document I need, e.g., "decide whether to buy a point-of-care ultrasound"].
What I already know: [paste anonymized numbers, notes, or an existing draft].
Constraints: [budget range, staffing, timeline, anything off the table].

Your job:
1. Ask me up to 5 questions before you answer if anything important is missing.
2. Lay out the options, with pros, cons and the key numbers for each.
3. Tell me what you'd want to verify before trusting this.
4. Flag anything that needs a lawyer, accountant or HR professional.

Format: short sections and bullet points I can read on my phone.

    Step 1 matters most. When AI asks questions first, it stops guessing.

    Five starter jobs for your first week:

    • Paste an anonymized monthly production export and ask for three trends and three questions to ask your team.
    • Draft or update one HR document you’ve been putting off.
    • Run your next equipment quote through the checklist in section 2.
    • Turn a messy list of to-dos into clear instructions for your manager or accountant.
    • Rewrite one page of your website and ask AI to flag any claim you can’t back up.

    Your move this week

    1. Pick one job. Choose the admin task you dread most and run it through the prompt above.
    2. Set your rules. Write three sentences on what data never goes into AI at your practice, and share them with your managers.
    3. Check one output against the source. Before you trust AI with anything bigger, prove to yourself where it gets things right and where it doesn’t.

    Independent practices don’t win by outspending the consolidators. We win by running tighter and moving faster. Used carefully, AI helps with both. If you want help setting this up in your own practice, that’s the kind of work I do on the Work with Adam page.

    Sources

The Veterinary CEO

Free, practical business education for veterinary practice owners — from a veterinarian who owns and runs the business, too.