When we started exploring veterinary clinic management, the first instinct was to look at what works for human hospitals. Decades of development, billions invested, surely there's something to learn.
We learned a lot. Mostly about what not to do.
Vet clinics aren't small hospitals
The superficial similarity is deceiving. Yes, both involve medical care, appointments, billing, and records. But the operational reality is completely different:
Scale and structure. Human hospitals have departments, specialists, shift rotations, and administrative hierarchies. Most vet clinics have one or two vets, a couple of technicians, and maybe a receptionist. Enterprise software designed for complex organizations is massive overkill.
Patient communication. Human patients talk. They describe symptoms, answer questions, provide history. Animals don't. Every piece of history comes from the owner, who may or may not be reliable. The documentation challenge is fundamentally different.
Speed of service. A vet might see 20-30 patients in a day. Each consultation is 10-15 minutes. There's no time for elaborate data entry. If the software slows things down, it gets abandoned.
Owner relationship. Pet owners aren't patients—they're customers. They compare prices, shop around, and expect responsive communication. The relationship is as much retail as it is healthcare.
What vets actually told us
We talked to dozens of veterinarians before writing a line of code. The complaints were consistent:
"I spend more time on paperwork than on patients."
"By the time I've entered everything into the system, the owner is already annoyed at waiting."
"I know I'm leaving money on the table because I forget to bill for things, but tracking everything is impossible during a busy day."
"My patients' owners live on WhatsApp. Why does every system want them to download another app?"
The pattern was clear: existing solutions were either too complex (hospital systems scaled down) or too simple (basic appointment booking). Nothing was built for how vet clinics actually operate.
What we built instead
CliniCore started from the vet's workflow, not from existing software categories. A few key decisions:
AI-powered clinical notes. If a vet spends 12 minutes with a patient and 8 minutes documenting, something's broken. We use AI to generate clinical notes from voice recordings. The vet talks while examining—the system writes.
WhatsApp-native communication. Pet owners are already on WhatsApp. They message friends, family, businesses—everyone. Fighting this is pointless. CliniCore integrates directly with WhatsApp for appointment reminders, follow-ups, and prescription sharing.
Automatic revenue capture. The system watches what happens during a visit and flags billable items the vet might forget. Not nagging—just a gentle "Did you mean to charge for this?" before checkout. Clinics using this consistently see 15-20% revenue increase from services they were already providing but not billing.
Mobile-first everything. Vets aren't sitting at desks. They're moving between exam rooms, surgery, and kennel areas. Everything in CliniCore works on a phone, including the clinical documentation.
The result
Early clinics using CliniCore report spending about half the time on documentation compared to their previous systems. Revenue per consultation is up because they're actually capturing everything. Owner satisfaction is higher because communication happens where owners already are.
None of this is revolutionary technology. It's just technology built for the actual problem instead of adapted from something else.
The lesson
Industry-specific software matters. The instinct to adapt existing solutions—"it works for hospitals, just make it simpler"—leads to products that don't quite fit anyone. The details of how a particular industry actually works are exactly where good software lives.
Vet clinics needed software built by people who watched vet clinics operate. Not hospital consultants. Not generic SaaS designers. People who understood that a vet examining a nervous cat while an anxious owner watches has about three seconds to interact with any software—and designed for that reality.