It is the year 2025. You are sitting in your office and your certified veterinary technician (CVT) has just video conferenced you from the living room of a longtime client of yours. The patient in question is Willow, a 7-month-old female spayed Mastiff with an area of alopecia on her head. The CVT completes and shares with you her thorough physical exam and you both determine no other significant findings. She performs a deep skin scraping of the area, examines the slide through the microscope in her truck, and finds Demodex mites. You prescribe Ivermectin for the puppy and, since it is a commonly used pharmaceutical, your technician is able to dispense it from her truck. The client will schedule a video-conference recheck in three weeks. As you hang up from the call, your second technician buzzes in right on time for your next appointment.

The scenario above depicts the future for veterinary medicine general practice. In fact, it is already a current practice in the human medical realm. There is actually an organization called the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) whose members are physicians, academicians, policy makers, and others who promote the safe and effective use of telemedicine to promote the health and well-being of people. They define telemedicine as "the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve a patient's clinical health status."2

 

The ATA developed practice guidelines for primary and urgent care as part of their mission to establish standards promoting patient safety and quality services provided via telemedicine.6 These guidelines include rationale for the use of telemedicine in a primary care setting, and they have determined that both acute and chronic medical conditions can be managed effectively by video-based telemedicine. These conditions include - but are not limited to - allergies, dermatologic issues, genitourinary conditions, otitis media, upper respiratory infections, congestive heart failure, and diabetes, a list that sounds all too familiar, also being common conditions seen in veterinary medicine general practice. The difference, however, is that with organizations such as the ATA, telemedicine is generally accepted and more developed in human medicine than it is in veterinary medicine.