VetPronto (YC W15) Brings Veterinary House Calls to San Francisco

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/16/vetpronto-brings-veterinary-house-calls-to-san-francisco/

by joewaltman • 12 years ago

22 11 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

sorenberg• 12 years ago

I'm very excited to be officially launched as a YC company!

brianhur3• 12 years ago

I am very excited to have the amazing YC partners to help us bring the best care possible to pets.

koji• 12 years ago

Haven't looked at the app myself, but was curious to know if providing vet feedback was available? Can specific vets be requested to build a repertoire with your pet?

joewaltman2• 12 years ago

Yes. Right now, this is done informally....but we definitely have plans to provide more structured vet request and feedback systems.

7Figures2Commas2• 12 years ago

“Once I got into the veterinary industry, I noticed there were a lot of gaps in technology all the way through,” Hur explains. “And since getting out and practicing medicine, I’ve really focused on bridging those gaps and making sure that veterinary medicine can be upgraded for the dot-com era.”

This sounds like a lot of fluff. Vets that do house calls are not new. The vet I use is a full-time mobile vet in the Bay Area and she has been for way longer than the founder has been practicing veterinary medicine. All of my furry friend's records are stored electronically so my vet can retrieve them on her tablet, and she has a mobile credit card reader for payment. She emails me lab test results and when I needed to be referred to a specialist for diagnostics that couldn't be done in a home setting, records were transferred to the specialist within hours.

What doesn't my vet have? A mobile booking app and a network of independent/subcontracted vets who she refers leads to. I don't care about the former (email and phone work just fine) and I don't want the latter (I specifically selected my vet based on her qualifications and references and continued relying on her based on the quality of service).

There's nothing wrong with VetPronto's model, of course. If the vets provide good service and customers are satisfied, that's great. But to pretend that veterinary medicine is behind the times and that a network of mobile vets with a booking app represents real innovation is silly.

Since launching in September, the company has done north of 300 appointments, and recently participated in the Y Combinator startup accelerator which offered them a bit of seed funding. But beyond that and a small friends and family round, VetPronto has been bootstrapped.

So you can raise six figures in capital from Silicon Valley's most prominent startup accelerator, as well as friends and family, and still call yourself "bootstrapped" today?

pkaye• 12 years ago

It is coming to an era where becoming the middle man is where the money is at. You basically get a webpage, some customer traction and take a 20-30% cut of the transaction.

brianhur3• 12 years ago

First of all, thanks for voicing your concerns as it helps hearing from other pet owners. It makes sense that most people are not aware of what happens behind the curtain with the medicine their doctors practice.

I am sure your home vet is a great veterinarian and cannot speak to the quality of medicine they practice as I do not work with them that I am aware of. However, I can let you know that you don't need to look at me as an individual to assess the medicine VetPronto practices as almost no medical decisions are not made by me individually. We actually have a board of veterinarians meeting weekly to ensure our standards of care are the very best as peered review practices are generally the gold standard. I do not know the exact number of years experience combined we have, but it is greater than any individual veterinarian.

As for the technology. This is a huge discussion but let me see if I can address this briefly ass to what makes us different than another home vet. There is a lot of issues regarding the management of pet health care that has not been worked out. Luckily we don't have the same amount of regulation that makes it difficult to create software readily, but it is also not a lucrative business to just make veterinary software. There are also currently no veterinary practices built around technology that I am aware of either which means most record systems actually decrease a veterinarians efficiency rather than improving it and are primarily designed to track billing and inventory. Our software is being built from the ground up ensuring that it allows vets to focus on what they do best, practice medicine.

Finally, we only received funds a less than a month ago and haven't even got our funds from YC yet, so yes...we have very much been bootstrapped although it is debatable if we still are today.

If I didn't answer your question well enough please let me know or you have additional questions, please let me know.

7Figures2Commas2• 12 years ago

...as almost no medical decisions are not made by me individually. We actually have a board of veterinarians meeting weekly to ensure our standards of care are the very best as peered review practices are generally the gold standard. I do not know the exact number of years experience combined we have, but it is greater than any individual veterinarian.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. It's great that you have established practices for the vets in your network in an effort to ensure a high standard of care, but what makes you think that other vets don't adopt best practices? Just because you assemble a team ("board") of vets with, say, 70 years of combined experience doesn't mean a lot to me. I could pull 10 software engineers with 40 years of combined experience into a room and it wouldn't mean that I have access to more expertise than a single engineer with 20 years of experience.

As for "almost no medical decisions are not made by me individually," this is confusing to me. Let's say you palpate a dog on a house call and feel a mass. Are you not going to make certain decisions on the spot? Is every decision or recommendation a vet in your network makes reviewed by a team whose members may not have actually had the opportunity to physically evaluate the pet?

There is a lot of issues regarding the management of pet health care that has not been worked out. Luckily we don't have the same amount of regulation that makes it difficult to create software readily, but it is also not a lucrative business to just make veterinary software. There are also currently no veterinary practices built around technology that I am aware of either which means most record systems actually decrease a veterinarians efficiency rather than improving it and are primarily designed to track billing and inventory. Our software is being built from the ground up ensuring that it allows vets to focus on what they do best, practice medicine.

This is all very non-specific.

Again, I'll use my experience as an example. I have received high-quality, cost-effective service from my mobile vet. She arrives on time, is responsive and very cost-effective. In short, she has taken great care of my pet, access to special software or not. When she identified an issue that demanded the expertise of a specialist, a referral was made to one of the best specialty centers in Northern California. All of my pet's records were transferred within hours.

With all due respect, it is absolutely not true that there are "no veterinary practices built around technology." The specialty center I was referred to, which is staffed by board certified vets, makes extensive use of technology. Is a practice with everything from an on-site CT scan to one of newest linear accelerators available for radiation therapy in pets not "built around technology"?

In short, you seem to believe that custom practice management software with a mobile booking app makes you a technology-based veterinary practice. While I see nothing wrong with the nature of your service and wish you the best of luck, I would simply suggest that you're underestimating what the word "technology" means in modern veterinary medicine. Of course, this "wrap a mobile app around a service business and call it a technology business" approach is widespread today and not exclusive to your industry, so anything that I wrote here which might be construed as criticism applies to many startups.

Finally, as for "but it is also not a lucrative business to just make veterinary software," you might want to look at http://www.henryschein.com, a Fortune 500 company that did hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of dental, medical and vet practice management software in 2013.

jkestner• 12 years ago

That's a cool vet you have. I'd be curious to know how she got into doing it this way - are there other apps for vets, or did she roll her own? Most vets aren't that cool. If VetPronto gives any vet access to more customers and gives their customers a better experience, then everyone wins. I'm not sure this is being claimed as innovation, whatever that matters. There's a lot of money to be made, and pain points to be removed, by making well-honed tools for specific industries.

This removes the total pain it is to take my animals to the vet. That, plus modernizing any paper-native cottage industry, is worthy. It's funny that this might be an effective way to prototype solutions for human healthcare without jumping right into the industry inertia.

(Disclosure: Brian's my cousin.)

joewaltman2• 12 years ago

Sounds like you have a great vet who is on the cutting edge. Most veterinary clinics are not that technically sophisticated.

Also, a lot of our (note - I am a co-founder of VetPronto) technical platform is focused on making the experience as painless as possible for the vets. This involves setting availability, scheduling, records, billing, taxes, etc. It is one of those things that, if working properly, will be invisible to the end user (but is a non-trivial technical and operations effort).

Lastly, pardon the confusion around our boot-strapping. Up until a month ago, we had never raised any outside funding.

Thanks for your comment!

VetPronto (YC W15) Brings Veterinary House Calls to San Francisco

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