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You're listening to the Bird Bath. This episode of the Birdbath is brought to you by ante us 2026. If you work in animal health, whether you're building, funding or Delivering Care, October 26th to 28th in Boston is where you need to be. Ante brings together the full animal health value chain, discovery, development, delivery and 500 plus senior delegates. 26 pre scheduled one to one meetings for every attendee and three days of conversations. Not to just talk about the future of the industry, but to actually build it. Visit anti-us.com that's a H N T I-us.com to find out more and use the code birdbath10 for 10% off at checkout. Welcome back to the Bird Bath. Each week we scrape the surface of the news you need to know. So let's get into it. Top story this week is actually a couple. I had to pick between a few different ones, but I found a few unique and interesting things coming off the holiday weekend here. First off, Whisker Docs, which is the telehealth telemedicine provider, put out a sort of analysis of their own data and they put out the numbers that showed that their callers were 71% more likely to contact within 24 hours of an issue. And half of the people that are calling them are calling them within 12 hours of seeing that there's an early symptom or something that's going on with their pet. So people aren't sitting around waiting, they're picking up the phone or in Whisker Doc's case, they're sending a text or an email as well to, to get some of this care taken care of early. From the data that they provided, about 90% of early symptom cases avoided a trip to the ER. Now, on the flip side, they did show that the longer people wait, the more likely the VET and ER referral is. They said only about 30% of the calls that they get when people have waited end up with just home care and about 20% only end up with watchful monitoring once a condition drags on for days or weeks. I found this a little interesting when I was looking through it. You know, obviously we talked in the subsec maybe two weeks ago. I've been on vacation guys, so you gotta give me a break on the timing here. But we talked a little bit about the growth of telehealth and telemedicine across the industry and across the country and Rhode island stepped up a lot of you dug into the map that We've got on the terminal letting people see sort of where telemedicine is available. But it's one of these things that Whisk Whisker Docs is pairs with a lot of corporate benefit providers. So they are getting this into the hands of pet owners through companies and the companies are really the pieces that are driving this. They have annual subscriptions for $130 a year that gives you unlimited access, but they're charging as little as $5 to send an email to a vet, but up to $40 for a single phone call or a chat. So kind of a varied marketplace of what they're bringing to the space. I was not able to get my hands on the actual data. They just put out a press release with their own findings from their internal data. So take with a grain of salt, but it is interesting to sort of think that people and jibes with what Dutch has been putting out as well. But people are picking up the phone to figure out what's going on with their animals quickly, but they're not rushing into the clinic quickly. And that's the same sort of conversation that we saw from the PetSmart's charity data as well as a ton of the other data that we've been looking at. So interesting numbers from Whisker Docs and something definitely worth digging into a little bit more. Now, a very, very cool lady in the vet world, Dr. Charisse Roth, has stepped into a new role. Dr. Roth is the CEO of Vetland, which is the animal health arm of Pergo Scientific. So Vetland is a really cool, unique business that has the Vetland pouch which does localized antibiotic delivery straight into wounds for dogs and horses. And they really are trying to target some of that anti resistance that we're always hearing about. Um, I'm over here in the in Europe right now and the European markets are taking a big charge on the antibiotic resistance and resilience and trying to figure out ways to reduce the utilization of those as sort of a first line defense. But Dr. Roth, if you're not familiar with her, she has had a great career thus far, holds a ton of of really cool patents for inventions. She was the chief veterinary officer of digital Pet Health for Mars Veterinary Health. She was a advisor, or still is advisor for a care of at Bio. She was the chief medical officer at Fuzzy previously. She's been a really big proponent in pushing the way that this industry is looking at the future and the way that we're introducing new technologies into care. So this step into the role with Pergo Scientific and Vetlan makes a ton of sense. I though I've met some of the team from Vetlen myself and have found them to be extremely intelligent and a really unique business model. Dr. Stephanie Morley, who's a veterinarian and the president of Vetlen, said, I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Charisse Roth as Chief Executive Officer at Pergo Scientific. Sharice brings an exceptional combination of veterinary expertise, business leadership and a passion for innovation that aligns perfectly with our mission. So it's going to be awesome to see. I can't wait to see them drive this into the stratosphere and continue doing incredible things. So Shareese, congrats on the new role. You have got a great team there. And to the team at Pergo Scientific, congrats on the incredible new hire. Now if you're not wanting to go into big corporate worlds, maybe you're thinking about the open source world now. I spent a little bit of time in the Linux software world with Red Hat and got my feet wet on open source software, but the team Yosemite Crew is really bringing the idea of open source software to the PIM space. I had the chance to meet some of the creators of Yosemite Crew, gosh, I want to say almost two years ago when they were starting it off, but they're built as an open source public project so they've been building this out in public. Anyone can see the decisions that they're making, what's going on. It's a completely free open source software that people can utilize to run their practice. The new 2.0 version was just launched and it's a full, full PIMS in their own reporting. It's got soap notes, it's got inpatient monitoring, inventory check, prescriptions forms, vitals, billing, team chat, and it's all in that one record. They say a 50,000 plus users already utilizing this on their desktop, iOS and Android tools. And the big thing here is kind of an option to find a free and open source world in which people can begin running their practices. I for one have seen the opportunity for spaces to open up for people to not be locked into. The pims is sort of that single source of truth and a large corporate company being the holder of that. And Yosemite Crew has jumped on to try and find ways to increase the availability of integrations, make a really robust and clean way for businesses to be able to decide who they want to work with and it seems like they are starting to pick up some traction. So if you're looking for an open source PIMs. Now you got to know, you know, when there's an open source PIMs, that means everyone is on the hook for keeping it up and running and doing a great job with it. Unless we see a commercialization of the open source software like we did with Red Hat with Linux software. But right now it is open and available for people to start running their businesses on. So check it out. I would love to hear feedback from anyone that has already jumped on board. Finally, Lakefield Veterinary Group has launched the Care Beyond Limits fund. The intention here is for them to be able to bring a unique and available fund that can take care of animals that are, you know, able to continue living and have a positive prognosis, but that the funds are a limiting factor for the owner. The way that it works here is that cases are submitted by Lakefield hospitals and reviewed through an internal committee of licensed veterinarians. Funding is prioritized for pets with a favorable prognosis and a strong likelihood of returning to good quality of life following treatment. This is the first time that Lakefield has dug into kind of giving back into the space. They have a long standing partnership with organizations like World Vets and they support a free veterinary hospital in the Galapagos Islands which more than happy to go and do a live reporting from the source here if they want to send me out there. But it was neat about this one to see a corporate group stepping up and trying to find ways to, even if it's on a one off basis, ease some of the cost of care concerns that are happening and maybe give their teams the opportunity to feel a little bit more empowered to relieve some of the cost efforts to save lives that they know can be saved. But the thing that I found specifically interesting or particularly interesting about this is that Lakefield is one of the corporate groups that does not rebrand their practices. So by having a, a fund that Care Beyond Limits fund that is for all Lakefield practices, but not that very clear visual for pet owners when they're in the Lakefield practice. It's kind of an interesting jive there for me to try and figure out, hey, how does someone in a practice participate in this? Now it might seem like this is something maybe that the veterinarians and the teams in the clinics are going to be the ones raising their hands. They're going to be the ones submitting the information versus what we see with some other third party groups that provide this kind of funding. But overall, fantastic news. Congratulations. Can't wait to see where that goes. It was a good news story week, I think, and it should be. It's a holiday week. I'm on vacation. I'm actually sitting out by a lake by the mountains in Austria. So I had to bring you good news this week and more than happy to see what else we can find across our fantastic industry. And for more on these and other stories, join us by subscribing to our substack. There's a link in the bio. And don't miss out on any episodes by subscribing and rating the show. For the Birdbath, I'm Ryan Leech. See you next week.