Hi, I'm Stephen McLaughry, co-founder and CEO of VetBadger. My wife, Dr. Alexandra McLaughry, has been a veterinarian for over 20 years, practicing in and around Portland, Oregon. After working in a corporate-owned practice for too many years, she decided it was time to be her own boss, so we purchased BarburVet in 2014.
We built VetBadger because Dr. Alexandra needed it. The software available from the large corporations did not support the way she practices medicine. Soon we recognized that the problems with corporate medicine were similar to the problems with corporate software: When you focus solely on "shareholder value" you lose sight of the real value of the business: the relationships.
We Believe
Traditional "practice management" software is focused on the wrong problem. Electronic medical records are important, and connecting those records to financial management systems is helpful, but simply duplicating the features of a paper medical record and adding automated billing only addresses a tiny part of the complexity of running a veterinary practice.
It starts with your clients. Today's "pet parents" expect personal connections and cutting-edge technology. You have to meet those expectations if you want a chance to practice medicine.
Once you have formed those relationships with your clients, you'll quickly get overwhelmed if you don't have efficient support from your staff. Just like your clients, your employees have a vastly different set of expectations and alternatives than they had just a few years ago. Your teammates are critical to the success of your practice, and if you don't maintain those relationships and support those expectations, you'll be stuck finishing the job yourself, with a very clear understanding of the causes of burnout in this industry.
Even when you've come to terms with the relationships with your clients and your staff, you still need medical records and all the other systems that support your practice. And if you make the wrong choices here, the job of tying it all together can quickly overwhelm all the good work you've done.
All of these facets of practice management are intertwined, and that's why VetBadger provides support for all of them, integrated into a single system. Making it easy for your team to manage their work, and making it easy for you to handle the relationships with your clients, gives you the time and flexibility to focus on the animals under your care, which is the reason you started this career in the first place.