Dr. Eric Fish, DVM, DACVP, joins Dr. Andy Roark to tackle a tough question: Why does being a veterinary clinical pathologist feel darker right now, and what happens if AI turns “nice to have” diagnostics into “don’t need to have”? They unpack burnout and pay compression (including pathologists earning less than new grad GPs), consolidation in the lab market, and how digitization has pushed cytology toward point-of-care and high-volume “turn and burn” workflows with per-case bonuses that can be as low as $8 to $12. Eric explains how consultative lab medicine has shifted toward internists, why cytology’s cost and turnaround time are eroding its value, and what a better future could look like with AI that augments, triages, and keeps a human in the loop. Gang, let’s get into this episode.
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LINKS
https://allscience.substack.com/p/a-cry-for-help
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/vcp.70084
https://allscience.substack.com/p/five-minute-paper-validating-radiology
https://avmajournals.avma.org/view/journals/javma/aop/javma.25.10.0691/javma.25.10.0691.xml
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Eric Fish is a veterinary clinical pathologist and laboratory director at a large private referral center, with a career spanning academia, entrepreneurship, and industry. He co-founded Lacuna Diagnostics, the first point-of-care digital cytology company, spent years at IDEXX as a diagnostician and technology scouting manager, and even found time to work occasional relief ER shifts. Eric brings a unique perspective to the conversation around artificial intelligence: he has not only used voice recognition and large language model AI tools in his own practice, but also worked on teams building computer vision applications for medical imaging. He writes about AI and other hot topics in veterinary medicine in his Substack newsletter, All Science Great & Small.
