Teletriage and telementorship for veterinary practices

On this week’s episode of The Vet Blast Podcast presented by dvm360, host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, welcomes special guest Shadi Ireifej, DVM, DACVS-SA, to chat about teletriage and telementorship in veterinary medicine.

Throughout the episode, Christman and Ireifej talk about VetTriage, a 24/7 video telehealth platform that can assess both emergencies and nonemergencies; a new platform for VetTriage that offers mentorship for early career veterinarians; and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in veterinary care, including why Ireifej believes it is normally linked to virtual care.

Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: Do you think there is a disconnect, or is it all lumped in 1 bucket in the vet med world when they hear AI and virtual care? Or are they mutually exclusive? Or can there be some synergy there?

Shadi Ireifej, DVM, DACVS-SA: People want to combine the 2, because anything that's new technology gets lumped in the same category. And even though you can argue that virtual care is not new technology, per se, the way we are leveraging it is novel. AI is a new technology. Then it’s also about how we can leverage it. So they do tend to lump the 2 things together, but I don't mind. I love it. There's plenty of overlap in those spaces, and there's some competition with those spaces.

For example, if you've used any kind of AI teleradiology write-up. I'm still not impressed by the write-ups. I still think those reports are subpar, and we still need a human being to evaluate radiographs, whether you're a radiologist, an experienced veterinarian, or whatever it is. I still am not going to rely on the machine, so to speak, to interpret those radiographs for me. But when it comes to extracting information from the internet at lightning speed, [and] when it comes to medical records, documenting communication, [and] things like that, it's stellar at it. It's absolutely incredible at it.

Of course, we’ll see improvements in all these fronts, but they do tend to get lumped together. But I don't mind it; I expect it. There's going to be a world where my job is going to be irreversibly connected with [AI]. My example of that is on the telediagnostics [and] telemonitoring side…. If you have a device monitoring an animal's parameters, you can leverage [AI] more effectively…to determine whether or not a value that you measured on that animal is abnormal. And that can translate to a virtual call with a veterinarian to decide from there. [Say] it's been tagged as an abnormal value…[and] the dog's body temperature is elevated. I need a [vet] now to interpret what to do here.

So…that's going to happen before you know it. But currently, they do get lumped together, and I don't mind, because it's inevitable that they're going to become joined at the head, right?

Christman: Yeah, like what you said, I think they both can benefit one another at some point with where we're heading. Fantastic.