Dr. Jules Benson, BVSc, MRCVS, Chief Veterinary Officer at Nationwide, joins Dr. Andy Roark to talk about the power (and scarcity) of big data in veterinary medicine. They discuss how medical data is currently being collected in clinics and by pet insurance companies, and how this data can be harnessed to achieve better clinical outcomes while increasing access to care. Jules and Andy discuss the requirement for artificial intelligence to be trained on large data sets, and Jules explains how he thinks data collection inside veterinary practices will look in 10 years.
This episode is sponsored and made possible ad-free by Nationwide®!
LINKS
AVMA – AAVMC Veterinary Futures Commission
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Jules Benson, BVSc, MRCVS, is Chief Veterinary Officer at Nationwide. He is a veterinary industry strategist focused on ways technology and data can transform the veterinary profession and the lives of animals. A member of the Veterinary Innovation Council Board of Directors and MentorVet Advisory Board, he has nearly 20 years of experience in private practice, start-ups, marketing, and pet health data.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. I’m here with my friend Dr. Jules Benson today. This is a wild one. We talk all about artificial intelligence. We talk about data management, we talk about senior pets. We talk about what we can learn from gathering of empiric data, how vet medicine falls short in that regard and how we might fix it. We talk about breed predispositions for different diseases. We talk about using empiric data to practice a better spectrum of care and offer better options for people who are looking to take care of their pets. It is a sprawling conversation all about data and the future of vet medicine and how we’re going to manage cases in the future. So anyway, it is, boy, it’s a super fun episode. Eyes packed, full of ideas. I think you guys are going to really like it. I really enjoyed it. This episode is brought to you and free by our friends at Nationwide. So thanks to them guys, let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter:
(Singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Corner of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Jules Benson. Thanks for being here. It’s
Dr. Jules Benson:
Great to be back. Good to see you Andy. Yeah, I
Dr. Andy Roark:
Love having you on the podcast. For those who don’t know, you are the vice President of Pet Health at Nationwide. You’re also the Chief Veterinary Officer at Nationwide. Just like you’re just doing a couple of jobs.
Dr. Jules Benson:
I would say Heavy is the head that wears the Crown. I mean there’s multiple of those. No, it’s very lucky in that we get to do a lot of stuff at Nationwide. We were just, when you and I chat, we’d talk about all the cool things that people in our industry get to do and that’s Emily Tincher who works at Nationwide with me and I. We get to do a lot of cool stuff. Nationwide’s very good to us about letting us do cool things and cool research. So pretty lucky to have either of those two titles, much less both of them. Oh
Dr. Andy Roark:
Totally. That’s amazing. Yeah, you guys are doing cool stuff. I got to see Emily Tincher at the Uncharted conference back in April and I always love seeing hers. So we got to visit lot
Dr. Jules Benson:
Of, she’s a lot of energy. She’s the old day every day. So there’s great. But it’s also, come on, I’m an old man now. I can’t keep up with young people anymore.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh yeah. Well as you move up the ranks, you have people that you can send out on farm calls as we say. Let’s talk a bit, you guys have been publishing like mad recently and so I keep having you and Emily on and we’re talking about different research publications that are on You were on recently and we talked about the research that’s come out on and Super brachycephalic, which was actually, I thought that was really, really interesting. I think about it, every time I go to the dog park, I
Dr. Jules Benson:
Love, so it’s it I, it’s extreme Breakies Valleys, but I love super breaks. The Valley I super,
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, I’m sorry. Extreme.
Dr. Jules Benson:
It’s like because they need it. They need the help. I think
Dr. Andy Roark:
Super breakies of Valleys. It gives a positive spin to a dark, dark condition. I took my daughter, I took my daughter to a 5K fun run last weekend. And so it’s our first fun run and we’re there together and it’s put on by the local Humane Society. So they had a donation thing and everything and we had done it. And then as I got there, people were encouraged to bring their dogs and as we lined up hundreds of people to do this run, I realized this is a bad idea. I love pets,
Dr. Jules Benson:
But this is
Dr. Andy Roark:
Objectively a bad idea. And then they were like, everyone who plans to run fast come to this end. And everybody went to that end. So they’re like, they didn’t have a starting gun, thank God. But they were like, ready, set, go. And everyone takes off and they’re just, there’s dogs running, there’s leashes everywhere. And I was running behind this woman who had an English bulldog on a leash and it was running in front of her going as hard as it could. And then it just ran out of gas and sat down and she hit that thing and caught her foot and we went straight down and there was a pile up and the other dogs were like, what’s going on? And there’s leashes trip wires being pulled and just was like,
Dr. Jules Benson:
I hope they were retractable leashes because we all love retractable leashes and Oh yeah,
Dr. Andy Roark:
It was totally, well, how else do you run in a crowd except for the retractable leash? It’s like I was like, jump Hannah. We we spray, we did not stop and help. We jumped over the pile and continued our
Dr. Jules Benson:
Over the super break. Folic dog super
Dr. Andy Roark:
Didn’t look so super then buddy flying past him. But no, the other bright spot of that run was we were coming out at the end and there was this lady sitting on a bench and she was holding this old chihuahua and he was completely unconscious, like nose up on her neck. And she just looked at me and she said, he’s done.
Dr. Jules Benson:
He’s as if he guess he is. And he was just left the house then he’s done. Absolutely. Exactly. I was just, he’s dying. He’s done.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed that. Anyway, that’s enough bit of a tangent but yeah. Alright. Totally worth it. Okay, so let’s put the super extreme Brachycephalic society super
Dr. Jules Benson:
Extreme.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yep. You guys have turned out, turned two papers last year. The last one came out at the very end of the year on the science, or sorry, the data of aging and aging pats. And the first one was canine heavy and it was actually really cool for anybody who didn’t see it. So this paper was really neat in that it looked at a bajillion dogs. It was something like in all serious, what? Five and half million? So
Dr. Jules Benson:
This one was only 4,000,004.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Ok, only 4 million. Ok, so didn’t Glad you caught me there. I don’t want to over oversell it, but
Dr. Jules Benson:
It’s important because I remember when I was working on Bendon, when we were looking at the studies that were being done and the epic study, if anyone hasn’t seen that, the epic study was an awesome multi-center study on congestive heart failure in dogs. And it was so effective they actually stopped the study early because they didn’t want the control group getting the placebo anymore cause they found the drug to be so effective in treating early signs of cardiac disease. And that was like I think want to say five or 600 dogs. And of course that was a multicentric blinded study. So that’s a different animal. But just to think that most of the information we get in animal health is hundreds, maybe sometimes thousands of dogs. So when we talk about having millions of years of dog data or feline data, it has real power. And I think that’s what we found in this aging pets research.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I think that’s awesome. I don’t feel that there’s a lot of that research that’s out. And that brings me around. I want to touch quickly on the second paper, which is what more sort of feline focused and senior feline patients, but really what I wanted talk to you about, and we can get into some of the data on the senior pets and everything, but so you and I have talked a lot about spectrum of care and it’s something that I’m really interested in. I think it’s really important to me, spectrum of care is all about balancing the needs of the pet owners and access to care with advocating effectively for the patients and meeting the needs of the hospital. And I think that that is a very worthy goal and I think that that’s probably how we should approach practice. And so I look at that and so I look at spectrum of care and think about what we do. And one of the sort of pushbacks that I get sometimes is that people seem to think that when I start talking about spectrum of care, they’re talking about free styling. They’re just
Dr. Jules Benson:
Spectrum. The veterinary medicine. Yeah, yeah,
Dr. Andy Roark:
Exactly right. Oh, you’re talking about going back to some old school, put some cephalexin in a LS bag and maybe some B12 rub
Dr. Jules Benson:
Some bills and everything’s good.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. And we’re talking about there’s the gold center of care and then there’s often and increasingly often very acceptable silver standards of care that may very well be what people need or what they’re able to do.
Dr. Jules Benson:
And I think even the wording is interesting. So even internally, I think we start in the same place and we started saying, oh gold. And then when we talk about vet schools, we talk about platinum level of care. And I think we’ve even started to move away from those words in our everyday lives of words matter. I think we’re all navigating that in our ways, but we’ve started to try and use advanced and basic, I think for some of the reasons that when you put gold or silver or platinum on something, just because of how we’re conditioned, we’re also thinking, well that’s the best thing and it may be the highest level of medicine, but when we look at and the basic level of care, just to go back to that, so to advanced basic is not below the standard of care. And I think it’s really important that people help to distinguish between standard of care and gold standard of care.
I think been the issue we’ve had sometimes is people think that unless you’re offering the very highest level of care, you are not meeting the standard of care. So the standard of care is that which or any other veterinarian in your position would the minimum at which they would do to treat that animal to maintain the welfare of the animal. And so we’re certainly not talking about the wild west, we’re talking about people’s ability to, if you have a dog with a fracture for example, okay, there’s a basic level of care that involves splinting and pain management that may be ESMA to many people listening in practice and saying, how could you have a let dog walk out of a practice? Well limp out of a practice on a splint and on pain control, but that is an acceptable basic level of care. May be more, we may be saying, well you should really go to the referral clinic down the road and get it pinned. For sure. That might be a better outcome in the short, medium term. But we’re also looking at what is the evidence base to say that splinting isn’t going to have a similar long term effect for the majority of dogs than having a more advanced level of care. And I think that’s what you’re getting at that evidence base, Ryan,
Dr. Andy Roark:
That’s exactly it. And I love that. I love that you use that example. It’s not a higher standard of care if the pet owner doesn’t actually go down the road and now the pet does not have a real splint or a effective pain control for the duration of their pain. I would say ok, well that was by sending them to the referral clinic when they didn’t actually go was a much worse outcome. Not because of anything the practitioner did, but just because of the realities of the circumstance. So I think that’s an excellent way to put it and a really good example.
Dr. Jules Benson:
Well I think, as I said, the level of care is, I mean it’s, it finances come into a lot and I would just put a small pin to say it’s not always what they can afford, what they’re able to prioritize affording. I mean I think you can have people who are making decent money, but they have other things that do. It’s either they have four kids who are all of a young age and people choosing to prioritize their money in different ways. I think we as an industry have a really hard time with that. And I understand why, because we see ourselves as stewards and guardians of the pets, but ultimately we’re also there to try and make sure that the best outcome is there for everybody, including the pet family. So we have to be, I always try and think of my time in practice and try and the times where I was judgy frankly and I was like, well why did this person do this or why did it do it this way? And just trying to think back, I would love to have had that time back and to be able to step outside of myself a little bit and to be a little bit less judgmental about how people chose to engage with veterinary care.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. I guess for me it’s not always about, it’s even always about the finances really. There are different components to that. There are some people who do not want to hospitalize a patient, not because of the money, but because they don’t want to be separated from their patient. And so you say, well them not hospitalized is a lower standard of care. I would like to hospitalize. I really would. It’s not about the money. I think a lot of times we go straight to that, but I still put that in a spectrum of care to say, yeah, I think if you want to measure and say this is the penultimate approach or this is the ultimate approach and this is a much more conservative approach, I would say, well, it’s a much more conservative approach, not because you can’t afford the premium advanced standard of care, but because of what this person needs for themselves. So anyway, I think there’s a lot different reasons for it. I think what I’m really interested in and where I to, and we’re already sort starting to move in this direction, but we’re already spiraling as we
Dr. Jules Benson:
Always do. Yeah,
Dr. Andy Roark:
It feels like flailing. I promise you. It’s like we’re right on course we’re going directly where I want to. Exactly. The thing I want, I want to talk to you about is when I think about standard of care and I start thinking about what is advanced versus basic, and I don’t always know Jules, I don’t always know and say, do I need to add, can I be this conservative or is that not where I need to be? Are there subtle things I could add or do differently that would have a significantly better outcome for the patient? Are there things that I am really pushing for because I think that they’re mission critical, but in reality they’re not mission critical. And I could do this another way. I mean the classic is the parvo treatment, outpatient versus inpatient. And boy, when we start talking about treating parvo patients, outpatient people, it was thought it was heresy.
And then you get some real data behind it that people can show and say, oh, we can do this very effectively outpatient. But that was just unheard of until you got some data support it and then you say, ok, we’ve got a protocol and we’ve got a way to approach this. And so I guess what I wanted to do with you is, so you’ve done such a good job at Nationwide of starting to collect data and starting to utilize data and starting to put data out into the community about what this means and what outcomes we can look for and what actually seems to make a difference in our treatments. And so I just want to start talking to you at a philoso level. It’s like, talk to me a little bit about data collection in our cases and how essential is it for us to be gathering data and where does the acquisition of data, this big data, nationwide level data, where does that do for us?
Dr. Jules Benson:
Well, this is one of my mean. How much time do we have have four hours for this? How long? It’s the
Dr. Andy Roark:
Standard four hour co shame podcast.
Dr. Jules Benson:
So I’ll try and ef. So I always ask when I’m talking to rooms of veterinary professionals about data, I always ask ’em if they’ve read the A B M B M C Veterinary Futures Commission summary document. And there’s usually in a room of a hundred people, there’s a couple. So it’s an 18
Dr. Andy Roark:
Page doc. Yeah, they’re lying. They’re, they’re just, they’re people who want to feel important. They
Dr. Jules Benson:
Thought I said Harry Potter. And they’re like, yeah, yes. So it’s an 18 page document. It was published in October, 2019 and it was written by people that you and I know. So Eleanor Green, fantastic. Previously dean at Texas a and m, you’ve got Adam Little who was on the podcast recently. You got Jason Johnson who is C B O at idexx and former dean of L M U. So some really super smart people. And what it does is really lay out what do we need to do to, to prepare our industry for the next 10 to 20 years. And one of the things it lays out is we got to be better at data. We as an industry are just, I don’t say we’re so far behind the ball, we just don’t even have as a consideration if we think about even our PIM systems, you talked about collecting data, our PIM systems, we use them as a glorified cash register.
We use them to record our medical notes and if we’re lucky, some structured data and by which I mean hey, if you record the weight, it’s in a separate field, not recorded somewhere in the medical note. So if we’re lucky we’re getting more and more practices who will use the structured data aspect of it. Now you and I have talked before about AI and machine learning and that type thing. I think we’re going to reach the point where practice management systems will get better at helping us gather our data in better ways. So we’ll be able to say, Hey, I see you putting the notes bcs five of nine, I’m going to go and put that in a discreet place somewhere or I’m going to put it in the data lake so it’s accessible as a piece of metadata. So I think we’ll start to get systems that are smarter.
Cause I think us as clinicians to change the way that we do things. And I think anyone who’s worked in ABANFIELD or something like that, there’s these medical record systems where you’re asking, you’re being asked to put in multiple fields and this’s just the old system. I think they’ve got much better at Banfield than in the past 10 years. But it used to be that you have to put in multiple fields and it’s hard to do. Here’s a clinician, you’re trying to see the pet, so we’ll get systems that are better and then what can we do with it? I mean that’s how we get evidence-based medicine. So what we’re trying to do at the moment and what’s the result of the aging pets paper that you taught us about right now, we’re able to take this massive trove of data and say really interesting things about where are the diseases we’re seeing, what age of the pets, what breeds are they, what sizes are they?
And right now we’re focused on identification, education and intervention. So we’re saying, hey, we know that for example, miniature pinches are going to be a really high risk for pancreatitis and diabetes. So how do we prepare the parent and how do we help the veterinary healthcare team leverage their time and their resources best, have the most relevant conversations with owners of senior miniature dobermans and have that quality conversation long term? The goal would be exactly as you said, let’s look at an intervention, whether that’s pancreatitis for example. Let’s look and see what drugs they used and what the outcomes were. What were the rechecks, how were they feeling at home? And actually these recording of people’s, how they’re feeling about their pet, this client specific outcome measures. This is more and more what we’re seeing in human medicine as well. Does it really matter what we as clinicians feel as the most fitting clinical resolution? Or does it matter how the pet family feels when they’re at home after having their pet seen? Does your pet seem better? Are you okay with the treatment? How are you feeling about the outcomes? Those are things that we can be collecting and our current levels of communication software getting better at. But the sooner that those things are all integrated into one data set, I think the better, the closer it will be to getting true evidence-based outcomes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay. So I have a lot of different, I can go a lot of different ways here. Yeah, a lot. But it’s great. But you got, you’ve got my gear sort of spinning in a lot of different way. Are you guys doing now, are you doing satisfaction with treatment communications with pet owners? Is that a thing that nationwide collects or that other pet insurance companies collect or that vet clinics even collect?
Dr. Jules Benson:
So it’s something as an industry that we’re not doing well. And I think, so I first saw this when I started looking at, I was on the project doing pain scoring and there’s a Cincinnati pain score and it uses clients, this C S O M client-specific outcome measures as a way to say how is the pain as the observer of the pain, how do you feel the pain is at home? How do you feel the resolution of the pain is? And it’s something that we talk about more and more. And I think just having been to a conference on human technology and that interface, getting that aspect of the pet health journey or the health journey is increasingly important. And I think if you think about, I mean we’re going off on a tangent here, but if you think about compensation and we think about our compensation as veterinary healthcare teams, we don’t really have a good measure. There’s a couple of clinic change doing this now, but we don’t really as an industry have a good measure of how satisfied people are, how likely they are to come back, how good they felt about their experience, getting some more of that. But it’s usually along the lines of net promoter scores.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes, that’s what I was just thinking less
Dr. Jules Benson:
Is the clinical, what is the satisfaction with the medical situation you have. And so I think it’s something that’s really powerful because to me, if we just start look at more reasonable measures of compensation, cause I think our production based compensation puts us in a tough spot. I think if we look at spectrum of care, it’s one of the areas, I think it’s one of the main pushback areas for spectrum of care is like, does that mean we’re going to make less money as a practice and as frankly as an individual? And it’s not something that veterinarians are saying it’s important I make money, but they’re also like, Hey, we have to run a business and there are aspects of spectrum of care, which I think we can talk about another time where we think that’s less of an issue. If you’re doing more crucial ligament surgeries in your practice, that’s a more lucrative kind of proposition than sending them out for example. Yeah. But the client specific outcome measures that could be, to me, that’s a crucial part of our industry moving forwards for both evidence-based care and for our ability to measure the impact we’re having on our clients.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh yeah. No, I think so again, a lot there on back. I, I’m really interested in, what do you
Dr. Jules Benson:
Call this one Andy? I don’t know
Dr. Andy Roark:
What I’m going to come up with a title that’s handy and Jules Wander and course the
Dr. Jules Benson:
Exactly.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. No, so again, there’s a lot here. What’s funny, I thought for a long time we talked about spectrum care and I think a lot of it is the one of benefits of that approach is you build trust and you tend to have longer term relationships. And so while I do think that you know, might not see the maxed out average client transaction, you would see if you just like this is the only option is go hard as you can on this treatment. I do think that you tend to keep those clients longer. And I think over the life of the client, not the pat, but you, you’re going to build these relationships. Man, I had a guest on recently talking as well about what he was seeing as the future of that medicine. I was really struck by it. But his position was that we would be probably utilizing our paraprofessionals more and then general practitioners would be taking back a lot of the types of cases that we’ve gotten in the habit of referring away that definitely could be done by a general practitioner practicing at the top of her, his license. And I like that. I thought that was really interesting as well. And so I’m not sold on the idea that practicing a more conservative approach in the moment when you have a sick pet is ultimately a net negative. And in the revenues of the practice, I think it can be financially healthy as well as as feeling good and feeling like we’re doing right by the path.
Dr. Jules Benson:
Well, and some of the research we did, which we’ll publish hopefully more on later this year with the mind genomics team really does talk about that. And it’s the clients who are most likely to say yes to advanced levels of care also would prefer to stay with the practice they would refer to have things done at the practice because they have that bond and they have that trust and, and it’s too strong to say we’re doing ourselves a disservice. But when I was in practice and being able to do things, I was very lucky in the practice I was in, they were teaching me lateral sutures for crucial leg winds and I was able to do peritoneal urostomies and some complex surgeries. I was very lucky they put in a position to be able to do that. But it also ended up being some of the most satisfying work I did on a purely technical skills basis. And it feels, when we talk to rooms full of veterinarians and I ask how many people are actually doing crucial ligament surgeries within general practice, it’s very, very few now. And I do think that is one of the things from a spectrum care point of view that we may be losing as a profession.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Switching gears here, talk to me a bit about artificial intelligence and its requirement for data. And so I’ve been looking a lot at chat G B T and things like this. And I see this, we call him Chad in my house, Chad is chat G B T. So Chad makes recommendations when we talk to him and hit and miss. I’ll just tell you hit and miss some good advice and some not so good advice. Just so you know, if you ask chat g bt if it knows me, it’ll say yes and it’ll talk about a veterinarian doing positive and then it’ll tell you that I wrote a book about the seven stages of grief, which is a hundred percent not true.
Dr. Jules Benson:
Obviously I’ve never Googled myself because I don’t, not that ego egotistical, but if I were to Google myself, there’s actually a Pilates teacher called Jules Benson, same spelling as well. And was, I think for a long time we had a Google
Dr. Andy Roark:
War
Dr. Jules Benson:
Of who was coming first. So you can find my Pilates instructional videos online.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Here you go, be looking for this. So anyway, I have this idea that artificial intelligence as a quick reference in the clinic is coming and I’m like, man, think of the power of being able to just run our blood work through AI and have AI be like, here’s the top five things that I would look at based on the breed, the signal and these diagnostics that we’re looking at. And so I brought that up and I think I may have been talking to Emily about it and she was like, yeah, the data that’s required to generate that type of learning is just not out there and accessible. And so can you talk a little bit about that?
Dr. Jules Benson:
Yeah, for sure. And again, I’m not putting myself, you know, had Adam Little on, I think Adam’s dug in into a lot more than I, but I have a basic understanding of the situation. So the good news is we’re already seeing some pretty well trained models in clinical decision support. So you told us about blood work and I think one of the ways which AI can be really helpful to us as a profession is when you’ve got multiple sources of information and you are, once it gets beyond four or five, our brains aren’t really good at synthesizing all those things and putting ’em together and putting ’em together in a picture, we tend to get a little bit lost and we tend to put the wrong emphasis on the wrong place, always on the wrong slab. And one of the things that AI can do for us, if we can create big enough data models, and this is what you’re getting at, if we have good high quality enough data models, by which we mean structured and standardized data, it doesn’t have to be standardized that well to have AI take advantage of it.
But until we have more structured data to learn from, it’s going to be really hard for most existing AI models to pull the information it needs out of our medical records. There’s just so much inconsistency out there. If you think about, and I was this, I used use, I used to soap the template when I was in practice and almost everything about the clinic clinical picture was in there. There was very little in a structure, there was nothing outside of temperature, weight, breed age, all those types of things. There wasn’t much else that was contained that until we have a way to actually increase the size and quality of those data sets. And to me, that’s where, when we talk about data interoperability, so the ability for us to exchange medical information between systems, that to me is the big promise of if we look at all the big companies who are in animal health, they must have AI on their roadmap. And to do that you have to have a high quality kind of basis of data. And I think that’s what we’re all driving towards. The problem is how do you get them to invest at the early stage to drive that forwards when the promise is three to five years out. Right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, and that totally makes sense. Digging in, the last thing I want to say is when you look into your crystal ball, given sort of where you’re saying we need to be investing in data, and it sounds like I don’t get to read that you’re wildly enthusiastic with how veterinarians are going after data collection at this time. I think that you’re not being critical, but I get the impression that you are not impressed with my putting in the weight, the temperature, and the technician’s initials in the practice manage software. I
Dr. Jules Benson:
Mean, I like your style when you do it, Andy, but the way how you’re actually know, I think it’s a lot of what I hear and when I talk about interoperability, I’m not talking about medical coding. That’s something separate. And we’ve had a lot of talk of ary medicine about that. To my mind, we can’t ask the clinicians to do more work in order for us to build a good data foundation. It has to be integrated into the way that we work at the moment. And there was some, was some interesting practice management tools and we’re always starting to see more of them where it’s taking the work they we’re already doing and then making it into data that makes sense on the backend. So right now, I mean invoices are the most structured data that we have. And if you think about if you’re giving out 30 mol, 75 milligrams, how many different ways are there saying that on an invoice line item?
There’s almost an infinite number of ways you could write that, right? But a good enough system should be able to say that is riol, the manufacturer is. So it is and it is this mil. And so be able to normalize and standardize those data. Basically we have to have smarter systems on the front end. So I think we as an industry have to ask for those things, but I don’t think it should be incumbent upon us as clinicians to say, well you have to put all the data into different places cause it’s just not realistic. Given our current environment
Dr. Andy Roark:
In 10 years, do we have those systems we does practice look different than it looks now? Tell me about that. I
Dr. Jules Benson:
Don’t think practice looks different, but I think the tools that we have are better at understanding what we’re putting into them. So exactly as you said, and we’re already seeing some of these AI aided tools for speaking into our systems and we’re already seeing tools that’ll take free text and do cool things. We couldn’t have predicted, I mean, five years ago I think we thought chat GPT was science fiction. And I think what they’ve been able to do and all of us who’ve been playing with it have been kind of blown away by how good it is. So I don’t want to underestimate how good that become at getting, pausing things like medical records going forwards. But I think we’ll get smarter tools on the front end and I hope we’ll have better levels of data exchange, which will allow greater development of AI machine learning tools on the back end.
Dr. Andy Roark:
No, that makes a ton of sense. I’m going to put links to the agent studies part one and two. I might put a link to the soup super brachycephalic study so people can see that if they want. Do you have other resources that you like for people who are data wonks who are just like, man, I love this, I love what he’s talking about. I want to know more about where we are and where we’re going. For
Dr. Jules Benson:
The three of those people who might be listening. I think I would definitely Google the A V M C, A V M A Ben Futures Commission that I’ll bring you to that document, which I think is an awesome read. And then I’m always posting about this stuff on LinkedIn so you can find me there. But otherwise we’re still building, I think we’re still building the foundation for how we move forward in this. So at the innovation, the Veterinary Innovation Council and the Association of Veterinary Informatics, I know there are teams there doing important work. So we’ll see what the next couple of years brings.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Outstanding. Jules, thanks for being here. Thanks for tuning in everybody.
Dr. Jules Benson:
Thanks Andy.
Dr. Andy Roark:
And that’s it. That’s what we got guys. I hope you enjoyed it. Hope you got something out of it. Thanks to Jules for being here and talking with me. As you can tell, we enjoy each other’s company. We are good friends and I am always thrilled to have him around and thanks to Nationwide for making this episode possible for everybody. Dang, that’s it. That’s all I got. Take care of yourselves. Be well. Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye.